Porta del Popolo, Rome

Porta del Popolo is the Aurelian Walls’ gateway between Piazza del Popolo and Piazzale Flaminio. It also bears the older name Porta Flaminia, tied to the consular road that continues through this opening. Notice the broad stone portal: this was a major threshold for arrivals from the north, valued more for directing urban movement than for military defence.

The gate you see was built for Sixtus the Fourth’s Jubilee of fourteen seventy-five, replacing an ancient Roman gateway that had become partly buried. Its present outward face took shape during the sixteenth century, when Pius the Fourth commissioned Michelangelo; Nanni di Baccio Bigio carried out the work from fifteen sixty-two to fifteen sixty-five, drawing on the Arch of Titus. The columns around the arch came from the former Basilica of Saint Peter, and the sculptor Francesco Mochi’s saints Peter and Paul were added within them in sixteen thirty-eight.

The city-facing façade is Bernini’s work, made for the arrival of Christina of Sweden after her abdication. Her ceremonial entry passed here on the twenty-third of December sixteen fifty-five. Much later, growing traffic brought the added passageways, opened in eighteen eighty-seven after the gate’s flanking towers were demolished.