Raguzzini, Filippo

RAGUZZINI, FILIPPO. - Architect, b. at Benevento ca. 1680, d. at Rome in February 1771.

He is a figure of an artist who in recent times has taken on notable importance and whose merits criticism has underscored, raising him from the oblivion of the past, caused in large part by the polemics aroused by his constructions in Rome, in the time of Benedict XIII who protected him, together with many other craftsmen and master builders of Benevento. He appears more and more as the first architect of the eighteenth century who understood urban planning and minor architecture in a manner different from the sumptuous Baroque, which from his works had a lively and singular development. His fundamental works in Rome are the arrangement of the Piazza di S. Ignazio with the characteristic buildings of exquisitely eighteenth-century taste, but rationally conceived to make the most of the restricted site, in front of the great seventeenth-century facade of the church: the hospital of S. Gallicano, developed horizontally, with the elegant front of the chapel, at the center.

Other works, more or less certain, are: the Madonna della Quercia, the arrangement of S. Sisto Vecchio, also in Rome. Recently his activity at Benevento has also been traced. - See pl. XXI.

Valerio Mariani