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Rare Third State With Text Panels

This remarkable 6-sheet Cadastral map of the area around Rome, nearly two meters wide, surveys the entire Roman Campagna in meticulous, measured detail.

Giovanni Battista Cingolani della Pergola compiled the data for Pope Alexander VII’s cadastre in the 1650s. The first edition appeared in 1692 under Pope Innocent XII. Domenico de Rossi re-engraved and reissued the map in 1704, entrusting the plate work to Pietro Paolo Girelli and securing the publication privilege and censorship license of Pope Clement XI. A long title in the upper-right cartouche announces the map’s purpose: to record “the measure, plan, and quantity of all the estates and farmhouses… for the public benefit and to maintain Rome’s grain supply (Annona).”

Below the map a 3-sheet table lists every tenuta and casale—over 400 entries—naming each owner and giving its exact area in rubbi, quarte, and scorte; a bar scale in catene geometriche (surveyors’ chains) fixes distance. Roads radiate from the city gates (Porta del Popolo, Porta San Paolo, Porta San Giovanni, and others); rivers, canals, and the surviving aqueducts weave across the plain; wooded hills and cultivated fields are shown with distinctive shading.This text, dated 1704 and published by de Rossi, first appears with the third state of the map.  

The Tyrrhenian coast is animated by a trident-wielding Neptune driving sea-horses, while a cherub beside a globed sphere introduces the scale cartouche and another bearded figure reclines with compass and armillary sphere—classical personifications of geography and measurement.

The lavish dedicatory cartouche in the upper-left corner is draped between two allegorical females and two cherubs. In florid Baroque Italian, Lorenzo Filippo de Rossi pledges the work to Marchese Francesco Maria Ruspoli, soon to be Prince of Cerveteri, praising “the generous qualities of your spirit” and acknowledging that Ruspoli “possesses so fair a part” of the countryside depicted. The dedication underscores the political economy of the Campagna: papal survey science relied on noble landholders to improve cultivation and furnish grain to the capital.

A later scholar, Ridolfino Venuti, updated the estate index in mid-century, and the papal Calcografia Camerale reprinted the survey in 1770. Cartographers such as Giambattista Nolli (whose 1748 plan of Rome was also published by the Rossi press) built on Cingolani’s example, but few maps matched its blend of cadastral precision, administrative utility, and high Baroque artistry. Today the Topografia Geometrica dell’Agro Romano remains a landmark document of early-modern land management, papal statecraft, and Roman visual culture. 

Rarity

The map is scarce. This third state is quite rare.