As a discipline, architectural history promises an assortment of tools to understand how interventions in the constructed environment reflect cultural desires to collectively shape the earth's meshwork and how physical environments have their own agency in such processes. Scholars continue to probe topics including architecture's role in environmental consumption and manufacturing – the undercurrent byproducts of systematic capitalism and industrialization. Fraught issues of toxicity and purging, aspects of which haunt the built environment, should continue to be tackled. Yet, broadly speaking, as architectural history engages and intersects with the environmental humanities, new means of evaluation are needed for buildings, urban environs, landscapes and territories. And indeed, fresh methods and epistemologies have started to emerge to innovate the way scholars narrate and write about the convergence of architecture and the history of the environment, for instance through what has been termed ‘environmental counter-histories.’ Landmark studies include Donna Haraway's publications that have demonstrated how gender has structured discourse about the natural, particularly within primatology. Erasing the boundary between subject and object, Haraway ascribes to a view of hybridity. Additionally, William Cronon has revealed, in his pathbreaking studies on Chicago, how society constructs landscapes.

This essay offers preliminary thoughts about the trajectory of charged, socioenvironmental interventions, focusing specifically on sixteenth-century Lazio, a region of Italy that looked to Rome as its political, cultural and geographic epicenter. To date, little attention has been given to how environmental thinking was a component of territorial and infrastructural interventions in pre-Enlightenment Europe.