View of Rome from Mt. Mario, in the Southeast

This is a highly unusual view of the far side of St. Peter’s from the southeast, situating the Castel Sant’Angelo near the centre of the horizon. Two centuries before its present-day metropolitan sprawl, Rococo Rome was relatively concentrated in urban scope, allowing for deliciously sudden contrasts between city and country, a paradox fully appreciated by so keen a student of landscape as Pannini.