EUROPE'S PLAZAS

Masterworks from 2,000 Years of Design

MAN, a gregarious animal, enjoys a spectacle, and on momentous occasions likes to gather informally with his fellows. To satisfy this urge, densely packed cities have yielded up their most precious commodity--space--to create the great, timeless squares, piazze, places and Plaetse. The best and most famous are the squares of Europe, handsome units of big-city living, often breathtakingly beautiful, exciting to walk through, and a breath of fresh air amidst the clutter of urban living. Against their splendid backdrops have unrolled many of the high moments of history. Through the centuries they have served as inspiration and model for the world's great architects.

ROME'S FORUM, today a stupendous relic left from the days when it was the heart of the proud Roman Republic and later a center of empire, was built on a drained swamp area between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills. Sacred to Roman eyes, it served as a marketplace, law center, place of oratory, government and worship, contained the ancient Umbilicus Romae (a brick navel marking the ideal center of the city) and the reputed tomb of Romulus.

Latter-day classicists have summoned up a nostalgic vision of classic Rome as an uncluttered prospect of soaring marble temples, each as immaculate as a white plaster model. The reality of the marketplace was far different. Most of its buildings were built of brick, wood and dingy stone until almost the beginning of the Christian era. The city itself, with a population that surpassed present-day Rome's 1,750,700, squeezed into an even smaller circumference, was a terrifying tangle of pedestrians, soldiers, horses, lurching sedan chairs and carts.*

City Planner Julius Caesar brought some order by decreeing that carts should move only at night; those overtaken by dawn had to remain parked until sunset. He also tried to straighten out confusion in the Forum by moving the Rostra (named for the rostra, ships' prows, captured at Actium), where orators held forth, to one end of the Forum. He began the 110-yd.-long Basilica Julia, alongside the Temple of Castor and Pollux (see cut), to serve as an exchange, law court and meeting place. Caesar's successors carried on with ever-increasing grandiloquence and display, creating whole new Forums in one imperial gesture. Boasted Augustus, Caesar's grandnephew: "I found a Rome of brick and left it marble."

ST. PETER'S SQUARE, so vast that it can hold 200,000 people standing before the largest church in Christendom, is a triumph of the second Rome that rose up under the Renaissance Popes from the ruins of classic Rome and the squalid clutter of the medieval city (which at one point had shrunk to a mere 15,000 malaria-ridden inhabitants). Michelangelo, Bramante and Raphael quarried out of the classic ruins the great principles they used in constructing St. Peter's (and quarried the ruins themselves for much of the stone). But even pagan Rome offered no precedent for an approach space to match in grandeur the massive bulk of the church.

The man chosen to solve the problem was Gian Lorenzo Bernini, foremost sculptor of his day, who in 1655 began erecting his immense colonnades--inspired, so it was said, by the vision of a form that would appear as a mighty archangel, with outspread, welcoming arms coming out of the body of the church. To round out his grand plan, Bernini placed 140 statues of saints, each 12 ft. in height, around the rim. With its two fountains, each 45 ft. high, and its center fixed by the massive, 320-ton obelisk that Emperor Caligula had brought from Heliopolis. the finished square was so vast that it has been called "the first large open space within a city."

SIENA'S PIAZZO DEL CAMPO, like Rome's Forum, was originally a marketplace set between Siena's three fortified hills. Still the center of the most perfectly preserved medieval city in Italy, the piazza lacks the dramatic impact of Bernini's baroque creation, but it has the charm and mellowness of a slow-growing, organic whole, surrounded with buildings of brick weathered sienna brown and warm pastel shades. The square is large enough to hold the town's whole population in its sloping, shell-shaped form, unified with simple, geometric lines radiating out from the Palazzo Pubblico. It is the site of mid-20th century celebrations that match in gusto those which so delighted the Renaissance storyteller Boccaccio.

FLORENCE'S PIAZZA DELLA SIGNORIA can boast that it is the greatest open-air sculpture museum in the world. There, with a commanding view, stands the massive equestrian statue of Cosimo I. Past the Fountain of Neptune is the copy of Michelangelo's great David. Still on public view are Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Donatello's Judith and Holoferaes.

Architecturally, the Piazza della Signoria is a unique example of the harmony of three styles, separated in time by some 250 years. Dominating them all is the rough-stoned Palazzo Vecchio, with its narrow, Tuscan-Gothic windows. At right angles stands the triple-arched Loggia dei Lanzi (named for the German lancers quartered there by the Medici), which many critics consider the most beautiful secular building in Florence. Between the two is the short, narrow street which Mannerist Painter Giorgio di Vasari created as a tour de force in perspective, leading to the Arno.

BRUSSELS' GRAND' PLACE is another handsome object lesson in the good-neighborliness of conflicting styles. The steep-roofed Hotel de Ville, a noble example of middle Gothic, rests comfortably alongside the fantasia of the guildhalls; the light, vibrant stone tracery of the late Gothic Broodhuis (Bread Market) surpasses, without clashing against, the ornate, 18th century classical fac,ade of the House of the Dukes of Brabant.

PARIS' PLACE DES VOSGES, originally called the Place Royale, was the first great Renaissance square in Paris. Henri IV first had in mind using it as a silk factory to rival Milan, but it later turned into one of the most fashionable addresses in Paris. The square, with its colonnade, is actually a series of joined houses; by royal decree the fac,ades were kept similar. Built of brick and stone, it became a model for Inigo Jones when he came to design Covent Garden, London's first square in the Italian manner.

PLACE DE LA CONCORDE is the triumph of planning produced by a brilliant architect named Jacques Ange Gabriel for his royal client, Louis XV. What Gabriel succeeded in doing was creating a square without surrounding it on four sides with buildings. To accomplish this, he formed a unit by crossing the axis of the Champs-Elysees, leading to Versailles, with a secondary axis delineated by the Rue Royale, which leads to the classic Church of the Madeleine. He marked the boundaries with a moat, placed small buildings in each corner, set an equestrian statue of the King in the center (the fountains and the Obelisk of Luxor were added later, in imitation of Rome's St. Peter's).

The result is the largest and in many ways the handsomest place in Paris. It is one of the ironies of history that this present from the Bourbon monarchs to the people of Paris ended in Bourbon tragedy. Within three decades its name had changed from Place Louis XV to Place de la Revolution. In it was set the guillotine that chopped off the heads of both Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie Antoinette.

BATH'S CIRCUS AND ROYAL CRESCENT, finished within six years of the Place de la Concorde, was one of Britain's supreme building triumphs. It resulted from the combined efforts of an unknown road builder, architect and artist named John Wood and his son John Wood Jr., who had taken over the cramped, run-down town of Bath, site of an ancient Roman spa, and rebuilt it into a showpiece of Georgian architecture and a prime example of unified English town planning. The younger Wood's supreme gambit was to take one elliptical segment of the oval form that Bernini used for St. Peter's Square, and throw it boldly along the city's outskirts, with an open prospect of unspoiled countryside. Binding together the 30 individual houses was a curtain wall modeled on a Palladian fac,ade with its Ionic columns; behind it, Wood allowed for a variety in depth to the buildings to suit each owner's demands.

How to incorporate these great architectural experiences of the past in terms of today's vocabulary of stone, steel, aluminum, glass and concrete is the challenge facing today's planner-architects. As one U.S. sculptor just back from Europe put it: "Americans have to go abroad to sit in what they should have right here."

* Groaned the Roman poet Juvenal, circa A.D. 100: "Who but the wealthy can sleep in Rome? The crisscross of wagons in the narrow, winding streets, the shouting of drovers make sleep impossible. Hurry as we may, we are blocked by the surging crowd . . . One digs an elbow into me, another bangs a wine cask against my head . . . New tunics are torn in two."

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