Piazza San Pietro, Rome

Piazza Retta is the open square before St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. It takes its name from the basilica, and both are dedicated to Saint Peter, the apostle Catholics recognize as the earliest pope. Gian Lorenzo Bernini is the architect of this piazza, which dates from sixteen sixty-seven.

His Italian Baroque design—an architecture of movement, spectacle, and grand scale—was made under Pope Alexander the Seventh during the years that followed. Take in the curving enclosure: Bernini set immense Tuscan colonnades around the oval, with each arcade banded by four ranks of columns. The stone architecture gathers the immense open space into a deliberate embrace, while the narrowing approach before the basilica intensifies its visual drama.

At the oval’s center rises an Egyptian obelisk, brought here in fifteen eighty-six. It had already travelled from Heliopolis to Alexandria and then Rome under Caligula, standing in Nero’s circus before its transfer to this setting. The monument is the sole Roman obelisk never to have fallen since antiquity.

Nearby, Bernini’s granite fountain, finished in sixteen seventy-five, answers Carlo Maderno’s earlier fountain across the piazza. This is a stage designed for an immense gathering, but its power lies in the way stone, water, and ancient Egypt are held within a single gesture.