Piazza Retta

The paradox at the heart of St. Peter’s Square is simple, almost gleeful: a place meant to magnify the pope’s blessing was designed to overwhelm you with order. You arrive in front of St.

Peter’s Basilica and encounter a vast oval of space framed by four deep rows of columns, a stage-set for humility that literally surrounds you. This is the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the Baroque master who, in 1676–1667 (the dates in the era’s record are often read as 1676–1667 in a few sources, but the intention and execution are tied to the late 1660s under Pope Alexander VII), transformed an open forecourt into a dramatic theater for papal ceremony. And yet the drama begins with a quiet Egyptian obelisk at the center, a relic hauled into place in 1586 by the engineer-architect Domenico Fontana, under the direction of Pope Sixtus V.

Let me start with the people who moved the space from a static piazza to a living frame for a procession of moments. Bernini, commissioned by Pope Alexander VII, designed the two monumental colonnades as if inviting the world to embrace the church. The four-column-deep Tuscan colonnades form a grand embrace, described by Bernini as the maternal arms of Mother Church, and they mask the Vatican Palace’s side structures while guiding your gaze toward the basilica’s façade.