GALILEI, ALESSANDRO. — Architect, born in Florence on 25 July 1691, died in Rome on 21 December 1736. He spent seven years of his youth in England, earning a good reputation there; thus, upon returning to Florence in 1719, he was appointed by Cosimo III and Gian Gastone de' Medici “first architect and superintendent of the royal buildings”; however, no works of his from this period are known.
In 1730, when Clement XII, of the Florentine Corsini family, was elected pope, G. was summoned to Rome, where in 1732 he began the new façade of S. Giovanni in Laterano, for which a competition had been announced, in which Fuga and Vanvitelli had also participated; the grandiose work, completed in 1735, recalls, in its Palladian use of the single order, the examples of the Englishmen Jones and Wren. In the same church, in 1734 G. completed the Corsini Chapel, commissioned to him by the Pontiff, a refined Greek-cross structure. His final work is the façade of S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, where the use of the two superimposed orders reveals an adherence to the schemes of the Counter-Reformation, interpreted, however, with a sensitivity that anticipates the Neoclassical style.