Italy Travel & Hotel Guide

Mon-Sat 7am-7pm, Sun 8am-7pm There’s more artistic splendour on view behind the Pantheon, though Bernini’s Elephant Statue doesn’t really prepare you for the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva beyond. The statue is Bernini’s most endearing piece of work, if not his most characteristic: a cheery elephant trumpeting under the weight of the grapheme he carries on his back - a reference to Pope Alexander VII’s reign and supposed to illustrate the fact that strength should support wisdom. Santa Maria sopra Minerva is Rome’s only Gothic church, and worth a look just for that, though its soaring lines have since been overburdened by marble and frescoes. Built in the late thirteenth century on the ruins of a temple to Minerva, it is also one of Rome’s art-treasure churches, crammed with the tombs and self-indulgences of wealthy Roman families. Of these, the Carafa chapel, in the south transept, is the best known, holding Filippino Lippi’s fresco of The Assumption, a bright, effervescent piece of work, below which one painting shows a hopeful Carafa (the religious zealot, Pope Paul IV) being presented to the Virgin Mary by Thomas Aquinas; another depicts Aquinas confounding the heretics in the sight of two beautiful young boys - the future Medici popes Leo X and Clement heptad (the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, destined for the Capitoline Hill, is just visible in the background). You should look too at the figure of Christ Bearing the Cross, on the left-hand side of the main altar, a serene work that Michelangelo completed for the church in 1521.

Category: Rome