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The Vatican City |
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The Vatican City |
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Piazza San Pietro
religious tourism - vatican tours - Papal audience - Vatican Gardens |
 The
fact, alone, that the great and truly unique Basilica of St. Peter's in Vatican faces out
on this square wonld make it perhaps the most widely known of Roman piaz-zas. But above
and beyond this, the space itself merits at-tention for its size (an enormous ellipse
whose greatest di-ameter measures 240 m.) and the brilliant project by Gian Lorenzo
Bernini whose scope was that of singling out this square from all others throngh the use
of the imposing  porticoes. |
These porticoes are arranged
in semicircles along the short sides of the square and consist of four parallel rows of
Tuscan-Doric columns which provide a choice of three paths. Above the canonic entablature
are 140 colossal statues of Saints, as well as the insignia of the patron pope, Alexander
VII. At the center  of the square, the plain obelisk, flanked by
two fountains, stands at the crossing of the two diameters of the ellipse. Termed "
aguglia " (needle) in the Middle Ages, the obelisk came from Heliopolis and was
brought to Rome by the em-peror Caligula, and set on the spina of Nero's Circus,which is
where St. Peter's in Vatican now stands. Throughout the various phases of restoration,
destruc-tion, and reconstruction, the " aguglia " stayed next to the Basilica
and was not set up at the center of the square until 1586 by Domenico Fontana, who also
saw to the en-ginecring aspect of the undertaking. |
The other architect, Carlo Fontana, designed the left-handiountain in Piazza San Pietro, built in 1677 as a pendant to the one on the right designed by Carlo Maderno about fifty years earli-er. A curious fact concerning the obelisk mentioned above is that it was used, or was believed to have been used in the Middle Ages, as a reliquary for the ashes of Caesar, and then (up to now) for a fragment of the Holy Cross.
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