St Peter’s Square

St Peter’s Square, Vatican City, Rome
Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0

Bernini’s square in front of St Peter’s embraces the visitor with two semicircular colonnades, four columns deep. The square holds vast crowds at the papal blessing and is one of the most magnificent urban spaces of the Baroque.

Pope Alexander VII gave Bernini the commission in 1656. The square was to hold the faithful at the Urbi et Orbi blessing and at the same time correct Maderno’s broad façade, which hid the dome. Bernini himself wrote that the colonnades were like the arms of the Church, receiving Catholics to strengthen them in their faith and heretics to reunite them with the Church.

The colonnades stand in four rows, and at two points between the obelisk and the fountains the rows line up so that you see only a single column. This is the Baroque way of working with the viewer: the space changes as you move. The straight street that Mussolini had cut through the old quarters in 1936–1950, the Via della Conciliazione, changed the effect; previously you came upon the square by surprise through narrow alleys.