The project is designed to highlight not only the consistent formation of the modern appearance of Rome, the history of changes in its space and architecture from the end of the 15th to the middle of the 18th century but also the essential idea of ​​​​the Eternal City for Rome as the largest integral work of art. The exhibition featured over 150 works from the Maxim Atayants collection, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts collections, the Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum, and the Far Eastern Art Museum. 

In the 16th–18th centuries, Rome was the most depicted city in the world. Dozens of artists from different countries sought to capture its appearance: for some, it was important as a center of ancient monuments, for others, as the center of the Catholic world, and for others, as an example of modern architecture. Thanks to these works, researchers can trace the consistent transformation of the city and its images: from the melancholic ruin landscapes of the 16th century to the triumphant urban views of the Baroque era.

The crowning glory of the centuries-old tradition of Roman veduta is the famous engravings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, which became the main portrait of the city, in which Antiquity and Baroque finally merged into a single whole. Depicting a particular monument, Piranesi always tried to show its context, constructing the view so that some other significant buildings, often depicted in other sheets of the same series of engravings, were in the background. 

Among the key exhibits are plans of Rome from different periods, which most vividly reflect the transformation of the city. Antonio Tempesta's plan (1593) shows Rome having already recovered from the decline of the Avignon Captivity and the 1527 sack by Charles V's Landsknechts. Giovanni Battista Nolli's plan of Rome (1748) is the first geographically accurate map, recording the appearance of the already fully built Baroque city, in the form in which its center has largely remained to this day.