Indice degli autori

Abstract: Away from the garrisons in Cyprus, in Rodi and finally in Malta, authentic frontier of the Christianity and theaters of the «perennial crusade» against the Ottoman threat, the Priorate of the knights of St. Giovanni, since the XIII century, it cultivates in Rome his primitive charity vocation and hospital in the center of the Foro di Augusto. Contemporarily it widens also his own patrimony with a dynamics politics of purchases and exchanges and graces to the amalgam with the patrimony Templare; already in 1333, the Priorate in Rome counts among the properties of the domus di San Basilio al Foro di Augusto e di Santa Maria all’Aventino and of other 40 precettories in the central Italy, about 2400 real estate unities from the consistent incomes. At the base of this rapid ascent it is the urgent bond with the pontiffs of turn, that it also manifests him in the urban arrangement of the area vaticana with the constitution of a housing nucleus to service of the Prior of Roma. The properties of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem on St. Pietro places for dimensions it constituted an authentic insula of Catholic Europe in the heart of the Vatican, also sees the exception that necessarily wanted not the Prior of Rome of Italian Language. The present study is set the objective to reconstruct the building consistence of the block of houses of the Priorate, demolished in 1667 to leave the place to the teatro of piazza St. Pietro, redrawn by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.