Veduta dell Anfiteatro Flavio, detto il Colosseo.

Title

Veduta dell Anfiteatro Flavio, detto il Colosseo.

Description

View of the famous Flavio Amphitheater (Pozzuoli Amphitheater) near Neaple. It is the third largest Roman amphitheater in Italy.

c. 1821

Artist

Rossini (1790-1857)

Rossini was born in Ravenna, he was, as he himself writes in his autobiography, a cousin of the composer Gioachino Rossini. He studied at the Academy of Bologna with Antonio Giuseppe Basoli and Giovanni Antonio Antolini and graduated as an architect and painter in 1813. As early as 1812 he was present at the excavations at the Vespasian temple in the Roman Forum and had made a drawing which in 1910 served to determine the location of the demolished building of the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus. Like his predecessor Piranesi, Rossini focused on remaining ancient Roman architecture and on excavations in Rome and the city's surroundings; he reproduced the classical architecture of Rome and Latium in extremely fine detail. In contrast to Piranesi, he more often placed the Roman ruins in bucolic frames in his etchings. His images of architectural masterpieces of ancient Rome, including the Pantheon, the Colosseum, Appian Street, the Temple of Peace, and the Golden House of Nero, have greatly influenced architects, artists, writers and other admirers of Roman culture to this day. His first series of vedutas was published in 1814. He began his series of "Roman Antiquities" (Antichità romane) in 1819, for which he created 101 large folio plates, which were published in Rome in 1825. Roman Hollenstein referred to Rossini (in the features section of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung) on ​​the occasion of the exhibition dedicated to him in the m.a.x. museo in Chiasso (2014) as the “most important Roman engraver in the succession of Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Historical Description

Southern Italy consists of today's Italian regions that belonged to the Kingdom of Sicily before the unification of Italy in 1861. These are the regions of Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Basilicata, Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. The Romans used to call the area of Sicily and coastal Southern Italy Magna Graecia ("Great Greece"), since it was so densely inhabited by the Greeks; the ancient geographers differed on whether the term included Sicily or merely Apulia and Calabria—Strabo being the most prominent advocate of the wider definitions. With this colonisation, Greek culture was exported to Italy, in its dialects of the Ancient Greek language, its religious rites and its traditions of the independent polis. An original Hellenic civilization soon developed, later interacting with the native Italic and Latin civilisations. The most important cultural transplant was the Chalcidean/Cumaean variety of the Greek alphabet, which was adopted by the Etruscans; the Old Italic alphabet subsequently evolved into the Latin alphabet, which became the most widely used alphabet in the world. In 1442 Alfonso V conquered the Kingdom of Naples and united Sicily and Naples as dependencies of the Crown of Aragon. When he died in 1458, the kingdom was again separated and Naples was inherited by Ferrante, Alfonso's illegitimate son. When Ferrante died in 1494, Charles VIII invaded Italy from France and used Angevin's claim to the throne of Naples, inherited by his father in 1481 after the death of King René's nephew, as an excuse to start the Italian wars. A point of contention between France and Spain for the next several decades, but French efforts to gain control of it weakened over the decades and Spanish control was never really compromised. The French finally gave up their claims to the kingdom through the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. With the Treaty of London (1557) the new client state of the so-called Presidi ("State of Garrisons") was founded and directly ruled by Spain as part of the Kingdom of Naples. After the War of the Spanish Succession in the early 18th century, possession of the kingdom again changed hands. Under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Naples was given to Charles VI, the Holy Roman Emperor.