The long pre-eminence of Italy in the arts came to an end even before the end of the old regime. Architects still flocked there, finding in each generation new sources of inspiration as first Renaissance palaces and then medieval churches succeeded Roman ruins as the preferred quarry of travellers of taste. But not after Piranesi was there an Italian architect with real international influence. At the opening of the new century doctrine flowed from Paris, not from Rome; increasingly, moreover, architects turned to England and Germany for still fresher ideas and ideals. Only a few Italian cities were notably ornamented in this period; on the other hand, none were blighted, and much ordinary building hardly even bears clear indications of its date. The characteristic and prominent productions of the period are, however, quite up to the highest international standards. They have thus far been underestimated, not least by the Italians themselves, partly because they are so much overshadowed in interest by earlier work, partly because they carry in Italy for the first time since the Gothic the onus—not entirely justified—of following a foreign lead. The Pope, like other legitimate sovereigns who returned to power after Napoleon’s fall, carried out existing projects, notably those for the Piazza del Popolo as planned by Valadier. He also initiated in 1817 the building of a new wing for the sculpture museum at the Vatican, the Braccio Nuovo by Raffaelle Stern (1774-1820). Completed in 1821, this is one of the finest of the many galleries in the line of descent from Simonetti’s Museo Pio-Clementino at the Vatican of which the first half of the nineteenth century saw so many (Plate 24). Taller and less ornately embellished than Klenze’s galleries in the Munich Glyptothek, and with rather stronger spatial articulation, this is none the less well within the Romantic Classical tradition as it had been established by the previous generation of French architects. The principal architectural activity of the post-Napoleonic years in Rome and, indeed, of the whole later period of papal rule was the reconstruction after a fire of the great fifth-century basilica of San Paolo fuori-le-mura. Begun by Pasquale Belli (1752-1833) in 1825, with whom were associated the younger Pietro Camporesi (1792-1873) and F. J. Bosio (1768-1845), the supervision was taken over after Belli’s death in 1833 by Luigi Poletti (1792-1869), who completed the job in 1856. Following closely the august original in its dimensions and proportions, San Paolo has a truly Roman Imperial scale; but the hardness of the materials, the polish of their surfaces, and the cold precision of their handling recalls rather the contemporary Paris churches of Lebas and Hittorff without matching their relatively rich colour. A more modest Roman monument of this period in a conspicuous location is the Teatro Argentina by Camporesi.