“The pope plieth in an old palace of the bishops of this city [Orvieto], ruinous and decayed. . . . The place may well be called Urbs Vetus. No one would give it any other name. Cannot tell how the Pope should be described as at liberty here, where hunger, scarcity, bad lodgings, and ill air keep him as much confined as he was in Castel Angel. His Holiness could not deny to Master Gregory that captivity at Rome was better than liberty here.” (107) This description of the papal residence in Orvieto written by Henry VIII’s representatives to the papal court in Orvieto, where Clement VII took refuge after the Sack of Rome in 1527, is one of the multitude of rich insights into the spaces and character of papal residences included in Pierre-Yves Le Pogam’s remarkable and monumental study of the history of papal palaces from 1254 to 1304. Begun as a doctoral thesis at Université Paris 1 in 2002, the project was developed while the author was at the École francaise de Rome in 2002–2003. An additional aspect of Le Pogam’s research concerning the organization of papal building projects and the workforce was published in another exemplary...