A decent and humble abode'. The Borghese apartment in the Convent of SS Domenico e Sisto and the Materiality of Religious Life in Baroque Rome

The project aims at the publishing of a monograph based on a completed research project.

The study examines female monastic life and cultural consumption in Rome during the first decades of the 18th century and is based on unpublished material in various Roman archives with emphasis on the Apostolic Archive in the Vatican.

The book analyzes and reconstructs the creation of a specific apartment that the papal family Borghese had built in the female convent SS Domenico e Sisto in occasion of two daughters in the family becoming nuns.

The unpublished archive material is the starting point for examining the legal, economic, artistic and social-historical conditions that surrounded the origin of this hitherto by scholars ignored typology in Roman Baroque architecture: the aristocratic convent apartment. Furthermore, the possibility of women's independent cultural consumption in the monastic context is analyzed.

The research field of the study's general themes is concentrated in Italy, Great Britain and the USA, but the book focuses on the least researched geographical area so far in terms of early modern monastic scholarship in Italy: Rome.

Theoretically, the study is linked to concepts used in Social History and Material Studies with references to Gender Studies and Visual Culture.

The method relates to the field of Microhistory, which means a detailed close reading of smaller communities such as the monastic ones. The book is written in English.