Jan-July & Sept-Dec regular 6.30am-noon & 4.30-7.00pm. The church of Santa Maria della Vittoria was built by Carlo Maderno and it has an interior that is one of the most elaborate examples of Baroque decoration in Rome: almost shockingly excessive to modern eyes, its ceiling and walls are pitted with carving, and statues are crammed into remote corners as in an over-stuffed attic. The church’s best-known feature, Bernini’s carving of the Ecstasy of St Theresa, the centrepiece of the sepulchral chapel of Cardinal Cornaro, continues the histrionics – a deliberately melodramatic work featuring a theatrically posed St Theresa against a backdrop of theatre-boxes on apiece side of the chapel, from which the Cornaro cardinals murmur and nudge apiece other as they watch the spectacle.