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Abstract: In February 1657, when Roman publisher Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi put a set of three large-scale prints representing Rome in a state of siege on the market, the city was still dealing with the effects of contagious disease. This essay examines these etchings, produced by the French printmaker Louis Rouhier and successfully marketed to both tourists and local print collectors about the city. It seeks to consider how new strategies of marketing prints and new strategies of controlling disease in the city intersect. The essay argues for a shift in the representation of the modern city by considering these prints in relation to touristic prints, other images of the plague sold through the market and published proposals for urban social control during times of crisis, including Girolamo Gastaldi’s Political and Legal Treatise on the Avoidance and Conquest of the Plague. (1684). It also situates the prints in relation to the orders of the Congregazione della sanità. The aim is to examine how the prints negotiate between the claims of print technology itself to enable new ways of viewing urban space and the claims of the street, which are shown to be navigated at this moment of urgency through the use and appropriation of prints.