CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The technical documents weren't making sense to Heather Hyde Minor. Most researchers studying 18th-century buildings in Rome rely on the "measurements and estimates" logs kept on each construction site, but Minor, now a professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois, was missing the spatial component necessary to understand the logs.
"So this is a story of great failure," Minor said, half-jokingly.
Frustrated by the files, she sought out a box of letters written by a pair of brothers involved in the construction of the buildings. "I had been hoping I would find something that would let me learn how a particular building came together, and instead, (the letters) just opened up a whole other world to me," Minor said.
The correspondence between the brothers - nephews of Pope Clement XII - gave Minor a glimpse into the personalities and power plays behind Rome's big building boom of the 1730s and 1740s, with the renovations of the basilicas of St. John Lateran and St. Mary Major, the restoration of the Arch of Constantine, the expansion of the papal complex on the Quirinal Hill, the creation of the Capitoline Museum, and many other projects.
Minor began reading the correspondence archives of other men involved in these construction projects. "I was just a complete junkie for letters," she said. "I really cast my net very wide in terms of the kinds of materials and archives that I was interested in looking at."
The result is Minor's first book, "The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome," published in 2010 by Pennsylvania State University Press. Last month, the Society for Italian Historical Studies awarded Minor's book the Marraro Prize. In their citation, the judges described Minor's book as "an erudite, lushly visual and path-breaking interdisciplinary account of how 18th-century Rome became modern."
Minor said the prize is gratifying because it suggests that her book appeals, as she hoped it would, to readers outside the narrow field of architectural history. "What excited me was that this prize came from historians - a completely different group of people who saw this book not as art history or architectural history but just as history," she said.
The 312-page text is enhanced with more than 150 photographs, illustrations and maps, and each chapter has an enticing title ("How Lione Pascoli Tried to Solve Everything With a List," for example).
Some of the research for this book was done for Minor's doctoral dissertation in art history at Princeton University. Thanks to a Samuel Kress Foundation fellowship, Minor had been able to spend two years poring through archives in more than a dozen libraries and collections in Rome and Florence. "How much time you have, in this kind of work, really shapes the topic you pick, what you do with it, the kind of projects you can complete," she said.
For example, one private archive in Florence had no electricity, so research could be done only during daylight hours. To make matters even more complicated, the archivist set her own schedule. "Literally, if she had an appointment to get her hair done, I could work only two hours that day," Minor said.
As soon as her dissertation was done, Minor moved to another project, co-editing a book of essays on G.B. Piranesi, an architect, artist and engraver working in Rome in the 1740s. Minor believes that shifting her focus to Piranesi for a time helped her write her book. "That time of being away from the material really allowed me to plow the dissertation under, sow salt on the furrows and see what would grow next," she said. Consequently, "The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome" moves far beyond her dissertation, branching out into entirely new areas of research.
"I had a lot of fun researching this book, and I had a lot of fun writing it," Minor said.