While this highly unique structure on the Janiculum Hill near the Porta San Pancrazio has the appearance of a house, it is, instead, the reconstruction of the façade of the house on the Macel de’Corvi where Michelangelo lived and where he died in 1564. The Macel de’Corvi house stood on a street off the Piazza Venezia in the center of Rome torn down at the end of the 19th century to make way for the construction of the Victor Emmanuel II Monument. The City preserved and relocated it to a nearby street, the Via delle Tre Pile. In 1941 the street was enlarged once more and the façade relocated, this time to its present site on the Janiculum. The structure it abuts is a water reservoir. A plaque on the side of a modern palazzo in Piazza Venezia near the old Macel de’Corvi commemorates the site of the original house of the City’s greatest Renaissance artist.
