Caffi was born outside of Venice in nearby Belluno, and attended the Venetian Academy of Fine Arts before moving to Rome in 1832. There, he devoted himself to landscape, painting detailed and large-scale views of the city - vedute - in the grand tradition of Venetian vedutisti, Canaletto and Guardi. A photographer as well, Caffi soon applied the then-fashionable panoramic format to his painted landscapes; his Panorama of Rome from Monte Mario (1857), now in the Museum of Rome, is a larger painting in oils, of a similar view to ours, spanning the Valle del Tevere on the left to St Peter’s Basilica on the right. A similar painting, smaller in size, is preserved in the Museum of Rome in Palazzo Braschi, dated 1857. 

Until the capture of Rome in 1870 by the army of the newly united Italy, the city had remained more or less the same size since antiquity. It was only after that it began to grow beyond the ancient city walls.

Ippolito Caffi, who arrived in Rome in 1832, immediately began to dedicate himself to landscapes and views, carrying forward his idea of a "perspective painter", a legacy of traditional Venetian landscape painting, which later merged into the small volume "Lessons in practical perspective". In 1837 he painted four views, two of Rome and two of Venice for the Caffè Greco, the meeting place of Italian and foreign artists, as well as the Roman school of photography. However, the first time that the painter from Belluno attempted to capture a view of Rome was in 1835 with a large drawing still of Venetian ancestry, executed with the aim of making a lithograph of it, from the Capitol tower. Subsequently, starting from the 1940s, Caffi began to create and study images with the aim of creating a 180-degree panorama of Rome. Furthermore, in 1851, the taste for this kind of view was fueled by a stay in London, during which the painter had admired the Panorama, a very popular genre of entertainment at the time, by which he was very impressed. In any case, the contact with photography that he practiced personally and which he also knew through the relationship he had with the photographers of the Caffè Greco and Giacomo Caneva in particular contributed to influencing Caffi's landscape painting in the Roman years. Numerous calotypes, executed by the latter between 1852 and 1855, having as their subject the panorama of Rome taken from Monte Mario, have strong affinities with Caffi's views and demonstrate the interchange between the two artists (Pirani, in Caffi 2005 ) From this perspective, the central work of the Roman Caffi is the vast work on three canvases "Panorama of Rome from Monte Mario" (Museum of Rome), from around 1857, very similar to the contemporary photographic view of Rome by Giacomo Caneva , from around 1855, preserved in Rome, at the National Photographic Cabinet (p. 283, F. Pirani, in Ippolito Caffi, lights of the Mediterranean). The painting in question derives from the view of the Museum of Rome and shows its central area , like a sort of zoom on the historic center, and therefore perhaps datable to the same year. The composition of the Museum of Rome was certainly exhibited in Rome in 1959 together with the related sketch (Venice, Correr Museum) and an oil on a similar subject (Venice, International Gallery of Modern Art), while a "View from Monte Mario" it appeared at the Promotrice of Turin in 1862. The photographic aid in the work is evident above all in the layout which cuts the farmhouses in the foreground and the lateral areas of the view; the pictorial rendering, however, condenses atmospheric impressions and eighteenth-century Venetian landscape painting, a rationally set topographic composition and the aspirations of the new romantic landscape. That is, Caffi carries out a geographical-atmospheric and historical synthesis (Di Majo 2006a) in order to place at the center of the work the relationship between the set of monuments of classical and Christian Rome - the capital of the arts - and its surrounding landscape, at the same time irresistible, in the 19th century, for travelers on the Grand Tour (Di Majo-Susinno 1986 and Di Majo 2006b)