RAGUZZINI, FILIPPO. - Architect, born at Benevento about 1680, died at Rome in February 1771.
He is an artistic figure who in recent times has assumed considerable importance and whose merits criticism has emphasized, rescuing him from the oblivion of the past, caused largely by the controversies aroused by his buildings in Rome, at the time of Benedetto XIII, who protected him, together with many other craftsmen and master builders from Benevento. He increasingly appears as the first eighteenth-century architect to conceive urban planning and minor architecture differently from sumptuous Baroque, and these fields experienced a lively and distinctive development through his works. His principal works in Rome are the arrangement of Piazza di S. Ignazio, with its characteristic buildings of exquisitely eighteenth-century taste, yet rationally designed to make the fullest use of the restricted site before the great seventeenth-century façade of the church; and the hospital of S. Gallicano, developed horizontally, with the elegant façade of the chapel at its centre.
Other works, more or less certainly attributable to him, are: the Madonna della Quercia and the arrangement of S. Sisto Vecchio, likewise in Rome. His activity at Benevento has also recently been traced. - See plate XXI.