Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio a Fontana di Trevi, Rome

Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio a Fontana di Trevi is the Catholic church beside the Trevi Fountain. The building you see was created from sixteen forty-six to sixteen fifty by Martino Longhi the Younger, and it served the nearby Quirinal Palace as its parish church. Notice the crowded rhythm of the travertine front: eighteen freestanding Corinthian columns give it such an unusually dense presence that Romans nicknamed it the canebrake.

This is Baroque architecture, a dramatic manner that uses movement, sculpture, and emphatic ornament to stir the viewer. Cardinal Mazarin commissioned the rebuilding, and his coat of arms and cardinal’s hat dominate the sculptural display, borne by angels. The church has an extraordinary papal connection: it keeps the embalmed hearts and internal organs of twenty-two popes, ranging from Sixtus the Fifth to Leo the Thirteenth.

A medieval church had occupied this site long before the present building; it appears in a papal document of nine sixty-two. Within, the space is a single nave, with Francesco Pascucci’s painting of the martyrdom of the patron saints at the altar. The illustrator and printmaker Bartolomeo Pinelli is buried here, alongside Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya.