J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

This page features a rapidly executed street scene, which the geographer and Turner researcher Roland Courtot has identified as Caprarola, a town bordering Lake Vico in the Viterbo province.1 Turner’s viewpoint was likely facing south-east from the present-day Via Filippo Nicolai, the town’s central thoroughfare, built on a steep incline. Formerly known as the Via Dritta, it was designed in the sixteenth century by the architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, and leads directly towards the hilltop Palazzo Farnese, Caprarola’s foremost landmark.2

At the top of the page, inverted relative to the street scene below, is a slight profile of Monte Soratte, as indicated by Turner’s inscription ‘Mont Soracte | Santo Oreste’. Facing the small town of Sant’Oreste, Monte Soratte lies twenty-eight miles north of Rome. For further views of this subject in the sketchbook, see under folio 27 verso (D21815).