📍Vicolo del Divino Amore 19, 00186 Rome, Italy
1604 – 1605“I was born Michelangelo Merisi and grew up in Milan and the small town of Caravaggio nearby; plague took my father when I was a child, and my mother died when I was a young man. I came to Rome around 1592 with almost nothing, painting heads and fruit for bread, until my pictures of card-sharps, fortune-tellers and musicians caught the eye of Cardinal del Monte. Around the start of 1604 I rented a small house and shop at number 19 in a narrow lane near the Palazzo Borghese, then called after Saints Cecilia and Biagio, now Vicolo del Divino Amore. My landlady, Prudenzia Bruni, let me take down part of the wooden ceiling between the floors so that I had room for my great canvases and, above all, light falling from above, as it does in my paintings — on condition that I put it back. I did not pay the rent; she locked me out, seized my belongings for the debt and took me to court, and the records of her complaints still survive in the State Archives. After a fatal sword fight in 1606 I fled Rome and never returned — yet my paintings still hang in the churches a few streets from this lane.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today