Urbis Speculum: progetti, cantiere, protagonisti

“Occhio della città” (City’s eye) and “Teatro del sole” (Sun’s theatre) are only two definitions among many other which were attributed by the literature of that time to the “Quattro Canti di Palermo” (Four Angles of Palermo), the celebrated grandstands built since 1608 in order to define in monumental form the "crux viarum" between Toledo and Maqueda streets. From the first project, designed by the Royal engineer Giulio Lasso, the vicissitude of construction develops until the mid-twenties, and in addition to that concerning the sculptural apparatus, between long pauses, rethinking of projects and iconographic "revolutions", denouncing inevitable conflicts between the authority of the monarchy and the civic Senate in the definition of the most representative square of the capital in the seventeenth century.