Bramante intensely studied classical architecture before creating his masterpiece but it is clear he made some renaissance alterations to the classical rule. Some scholars believe that his use of circular plan is a reference to the ancient Temple of Hercules Victor, which is in what is now the Piazza Bocca della Verità in Rome. However, his deviation from the traditional corinthian column capital seen on the Temple of Hercules Victor to the simple Doric order is an important distinction. Bramante’s original sketch included a plan for a circular courtyard to continue the strong concept of harmony seen throughout the work of architectural art, however it is placed in a plain rectangular space that makes the grandeur of the Tempietto feel somehow out of place.

A particularly interesting room for thinking about the relationship between the villa, frescoes, and imagined and real landscapes is the Sala delle Prospettive (The Room of Perspectives). Peruzzi himself painted this room between 1516 and 1518. In the Sala, marble floors blend seamlessly into wall frescoes of an imagined portico extended over an idealized, semi-pastoral, semi-antique, semi-late-medieval landscape of Rome, bordered on top by mythical scenes. Beyond the incredibly realistic marble columns and other faux-architectural structures, one can see Rome's countryside on the western wall (which faces western Rome's countryside) and a more built Rome on the eastern wall (which faces Rome's urban core across the river). Looking closely at the eastern wall, one can see features of medieval Rome -- campanili (bell towers), medieval houses, and churches -- in addition to the classical and pastoral features expected of Renaissance paintings of imagined landscapes. Oliver Grau describes this room and the almost subliminal experience it allowed its sixteenth-century visitor as the best Renaissance example of virtual reality, or the "idea of transposing the audience into an enclosed, illusionary visual space" (366).

Today, this room transposes its contemporary audience not just into an imagined classical and pastoral past, but also into an imagined late medieval and early Renaissance Rome. Through the fresco cycles and the actual windows looking out onto towers, campanili, the Aurelian Walls, and the villa's gardens, one can begin to imagine the Farnesina in its early modern landscape.

Although it the bears the name of the Farnese family (who bought the estate in 1577), it was commissioned by nouveau-riche Sienese banker Agostini Chigi as a testament to his own wealth, importance, and artistic patronage. He employed a young Baldassere Perruzi to design the building, and brought in a impressive team of master painters, including Raphael, Sodoma, del Piombo, and Bazzi (as well as Perruzi) to create elaborate fresco cycles. In its early days (constructed from approximately 1506 to 1511, with various fresco cycles completed later), the villa hosted many of Chigi's ostentatious, Gatsby-esque banquets. At one of these events, Chigi and his group of close, well-educated friends horrified his guests by instructing his servants to throw his guests' soiled silver and gold plates into the Tiber River -- but the dishes were not wasted, for Chigi had planted a net along the banks in preparation for this trick.

The remains of a monastic church were refurbished and a hospital was constructed adjacent to it. The adjacent Arch of Dolabella – once part of Rome’s Servian walls – was also pressed into service. John, after establishing the order, had become drawn to a life of monastic isolation. He retreated to a room over the arch until his death in 1213.

In many ways, the establishments of such “caritative” orders functioned more like franchises than outposts. Trinitarian branches, for instance, were responsible for funding themselves, which made them less inclined to obey central authority. San Tommasso was less a headquarters and more a working hospital. Nevertheless, the church’s location – immediately next to the major cardinal churches of San Stefano Rotondo and Santa Maria in Domnica, and a short walk from papal residence at the Lateran – seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Though the reason remains unclear, international missionary work was a top priority of Innocent’s. As pope, he certainly had some authority over the order. He would later influence staff appointments within the order itself. It is possible that the pope himself picked the location to easily observe and influence the order’s actions.

Finally, John’s decision to retreat to isolation testifies to a common tension in the early thirteenth century. He began a trend of activist religious orders, yet opted personally to live like a religious hermit of an older tradition. San Tommasso offered a unique space for this: Trinitarians entered the outside world in search of the sick, but they brought them back behind walls to care for them.

But the history of the water running through the fountain began much earlier. In the sixth century, Belisarius “repaired the aqueducts at the top of the Gianicolo...to have the water drive the mills on the slope of the hill” (Krautheimer). Pope Honorius followed suit in the early seventh century, regularizing the restorations of the aqueduct that made it more useful for the changing city. The Lombard siege in 756 caused massive damage to the city’s four major aqueducts (the Claudio-Anio Novus, Traiana, Jovia, and Virgo), and Pope Hadrian I worked at the end of that century to repair them. Archaeological evidence of massive reconstructions to the city’s aqueducts in the eighth and ninth centuries shows that huge sections of the aqueducts were completely rebuilt “up to a height of 20m, and for a distance of many kilometers” (Coates-Stephens 177).

In the ninth century, Trajan’s aqueduct was the primary water supply for much of Trastevere and the Vatican. In the medieval period, and especially when the papacy moved to Avignon and ceased major construction works in Rome, the aqueducts fell out of use and into disrepair. The aqueducts were gradually phased out of use and replaced by water mills in the Tiber, which explains why Trajan’s Aqueduct has survived only as an underground channel covered by Pope Paul V’s passion project - the Acqua Paola.

In 1519, the hospital underwent a major renovation, which coincided with two major events: the larger urbanization of Campo Marzio, which included the construction of two major roads, the Via del Babuino in 1523 and the Via di Ripetta in 1516, as well as the influx of sick individuals suffering from syphilis. The hospital actually received the additional name, degli Incurabili (of the incurables), in reaction to the syphilis outbreak, as there was no cure the disease at the time—patients were often treated with mercury, which usually harmed as much as it helped. Santa Maria Porta Paradisi can be seen as the conclusion of the renovation and extension of the hospital—indeed the moniker Porta Paradisi—Gate to Paradise—may have been given for those dying in the adjacent hospital.