Just off Via del Governo Vecchio the Chiesa Nuova is a highly ornate Baroque church - which is strange, because its founder, St Philip Neri, didn’t want it decorated at all. Neri was an ascetic man, who tended the poor and sick in the streets around here for most of his life, and commissioned this church, on the site on an early structure - Santa Maria in Valicella - which had been donated to him and his followers by Gregory XIII, in 1577. Neri died in 1595, after a relatively normal day of saintly tasks - his last words were “Last of all, we must die.” He was canonized in 1622, and this large church, as well as being his last resting-place (he lies in the chapel to the left of the apse), is his principal memorial. Inside, its principal features include three paintings by Rubens hung at the high altar, centring on the Virgin with Angels, and, perhaps more obviously, Pietro da Cortona’s ceiling paintings, showing the Ascension of the Virgin in the apse, and, above the nave, the construction of the church and Neri’s famous “vision of fire”, which he experienced in 1544. Behind the church, the delightful small square of Piazza del Orologio is so-called because of the quaint clocktower that is its main feature. The clock is part of the Oratorio dei Filipini , designed by Carlo Borromini, which backs onto the Chiesa Nuova and is part of the same complex: Neri’s followers attended musical gatherings here as part of their worship, gifting the language forever the musical term “oratorio”. Just off the square, there’s a scatter of antique and bric-a-brac shops, that signal that you’re just around the corner from Rome’s antiques ghetto, Via dei Coronari.