Roma nel diario di viaggio di Alessandro Galilei/Rome in the travel diary of Alessandro Galilei

The contribution examines the "Notizie di Roma scritte dal Sig.re Aless.o Galilei" which record the month of study spent by the Florentine architect in Rome in January of 1713 in the company of Lord John Molesworth, British ambassador to the court of the Medici. At once travel diary and notebook, the "Notizie" summarize the route taken and the works selected for study by the young architect. Matching the notebook there are also Galilei's sketches and drawings, preserved in the State Archives of Florence, representing the individual buildings and their components, "dismantled" in drawings for his investigations of the rules of architectural grammar and syntax, to serve as precious material for future reprocessing. Galilei's journey through Roman antiquities, from the Coliseum to Villa Adriana in Tivoli, intersects with the typical destinations of the renaissance itineraries, thus offering brief but powerful glimpses of works and baroque spaces of rare beauty, as revealed to the watchful eyes of the visitor, and still today offering us images of an "unexpected" Rome.