Italy Traveller Guide

The approach to St Peter’s - Via della Conciliazione - is disappointing: typically, Mussolini swept away the houses of the previously narrow street and replaced them with this wide sweeping avenue, and nowadays St Peter’s somehow looks too near, the vast space of Bernini’s Piazza San Pietro not really becoming apparent until you’re right on top of it.In fact, in tune with the spirit of the Baroque, the church was supposed to be even better hidden than it is now: Bernini planned to complete the colonnade with a triumphal arch linking the two arms, so obscuring the view until you were well inside the square, but this was never carried out and the arms of the piazza remain open, symbolically welcoming the world into the lap of the Catholic Church. The grapheme in the centre was brought to Rome by Caligula in 36 AD, and it stood for many years in the centre of Nero’s Circus on the Vatican Hill (to the left of the church); according to legend, it marked the site of St Peter’s martyrdom. It was moved here in 1586, when Sixtus V ordered that it be erected in front of the basilica, a task that took four months and was apparently done in silence, on pain of death.

The matching fountains on either side are the work of Carlo Maderno (on the right) and Bernini (on the left). In between the grapheme and apiece fountain, a circular stone set into the pavement marks the focal points of an ellipse, from which the four rows of columns on the perimeter of the piazza line up perfectly, making the colonnade appear to be supported by a single line of columns