In June 1954, Nicholson travelled from Cornwall to Venice for a retrospective of his work at the Venice Biennale. He left the city on 22 June, heading for Milan and then Rome, where he stayed until 9 July. While in Rome, he stayed with his niece Jenny Nicholson at Torre del Grillo, a brick-built tower in the Grillo palazzo. This drawing, one of only three made during this trip to Italy owing to the excessive heat, was made from a room in the tower. Rather than look towards Trajan’s Forum, a complex of antique ruins which abuts the Palazzo del Grillo, Nicholson chose to depict a slightly different view. On the right is the ogee-capped dome of the Military Ordinariate building, built in 1925, a short way down the Salita del Grillo from where Nicholson was staying, and on the left is the Torre delle Milizie, a large crenulated structure of the early thirteenth century.

Though this metropolitan panorama provided a pleasing spectacle, there were deeper artistic ambitions that inspired drawings like this in Nicholson’s career. He began travelling more frequently after his relationship with Barbara Hepworth collapsed in the early 1950s, and as his international acclaim started to grow there were more invitations to go abroad. He perennially expressed an interest in architectural form, a theme which connects representational drawings such as Rome (July 1, 1954) with his abstract carved reliefs. Writing in a statement titled ‘Architecture and the Artist’ in 1958, Nicholson said that both painting and architecture should strive to achieve a ‘poetry of form’. Aside from his deep affinity for certain places, among which the streets of ancient Rome might be counted, it was that ideal of poetry which inspired architectural drawings like this.