Guarino Guarini

Camillo Guarino Guarini, who lived from 1624 to 1683, was an Italian architect of the Piedmontese Baroque, active in Turin as well as Sicily, France and Portugal, and also a Theatine priest, mathematician and writer. Born in Modena into a deeply religious family, he and his four brothers all joined the Theatine Order, and at fifteen he became a novice at the monastery of San Silvestro al Quirinale in Rome, where he received a thorough training in theology, philosophy and mathematics and studied the work of Borromini. He returned to Modena as an ordained priest in 1648, lectured in philosophy at the Theatine College there and then taught in Messina, where he published the drama La Pietà Trionfante. His architecture represents the ultimate achievement of Italian Baroque structural engineering, built on complex geometry and crowned with daring domes, and his illustrated treatise Architettura civile of 1737 inspired later south German and Austrian architecture.