Various religious organizations and the Camera Apostolica owned most of the mills, but noble families such as the Cenci and Frangipane also owned mills. The monastery of SS. Cosma e Damiano sold and leased the anchoring sites for floating mills on Tiber Island and the Trastevere bank. Owners commonly rented out their mills to individual millers who were responsible for the work. Interestingly, the church also leased to nobles. The 1455 leasing of a site near Ponte Rotto by the canons S. Maria in Trastevere to Cipriano de Magnonibus included the right to build up to three mills on the property. The document included a royalties provision on these mills. It stipulated seven “rubla” of flour annually after the construction of the first mill, and more for each additional mill constructed. This inclusion shows that the canons had correctly identified this site as a prime area for milling. It additionally suggests that the construction of mills in the area was expected and even anticipated for in the contract.

Actually seeing these mills is probably the most difficult endeavor that a visitor might undertake while visiting the Tiber. While much of the urban landscape has changed, the natural one less so. One can still see the quickening of the river’s current near Tiber Island, and hopefully imagine a wheel puttering through its silty waves. A 1495 drawing from the Codex Escurialensis gives a downstream view of the mills near the Ponte Quattro Capi or the Ponte Fabricio, a bridge still standing today.

In 1473, Pope Sixtus IV decided to reconstruct the bridge slightly downstream to provide alternate routes of foot traffic for the 1475 Jubilee, and named the ponte after himself. Jill E. Blondin argues that Sixtus undertook his urban restoration work to promote himself, and to communicate "the message of his secular and sacred authority to observers" (1). In her analysis of both the bridge and Sixtus's other public works, Blondin finds that Sixtus emphasized both his own greatness and the greatness of antique and contemporary Rome. Blondin concludes that Sixtus "drew on antique symbols, sculptures, and buildings to create a glorious, new Christian Rome fashioned to represent him squarely in charge of the civic and spiritual dimensions of the city" (24). With Blondin's reminder of the continuing power of ancient Rome throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods, we may begin to imagine the Ponte Sisto as a site that, due to its ancient origins, may have continued to have symbolic significance even when it was in pieces in the Tiber.

In the Middle Ages, the ruins of the Teatro di Marcello served as an important economic site, hosting a meat market by 998 and a butcher shop that remained at least until the 16th century, as well as neighboring an enormous fish market by the 13th century. Indeed, the agricultural and industrial use of this site continued far longer than one might expect -- a twice-weekly cattle market was held in the teatro even into the 20th century!

By the end of the 11th century, the Pierlioni family had gained control of the area around the Teatro di Marcello and likely fortified the site as a stronghold and mansion. The Pierlioni are believed to have offered support, protection, and the use of their fortified mansion to Pope Urban II (1088-1099) when he was violently threatened by anti-pope factions in Rome (Krautheimer 105). Eventually, the fortress fell to the Orsini family, who built the Renaissance-era Palazzo Orsini that is still highly visible today. Throughout these chaotic transitions in ownership and moments of factional violence between families, the Teatro di Marcello remained an important site, not just for its strategic position or its economic functions, but as a place of public memory regarding classical Rome.

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.

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.