Anna Maria Ciddio

  Anna Maria Ciddio

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Piazza del Popolo

The square, once called "Piazza del Trullo" for the homonymous "Fountain" then moved to Piazza Nicosia, was so named because it was the main access road to the city as well as the most frequented by the people. It was the place where executions, games, fairs and shows took place. During the carnival, the "Corsa dei Bàrberi" began from this square, followed by the famous horse race.

The current arrangement of the square which makes it the most monumental and spectacular in Rome is the result of various interventions carried out over three centuries mainly by Sisto V, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Giuseppe Valadier. Its grandeur was underlined by Goethe who, as soon as he arrived in the square, exclaimed: "You are a world, Rome!", enraptured as well as statues, fountains and sphinxes, with unexpected and refined perspectives.

Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590) included the square in the new urban plan which envisaged the connection of the seven major basilicas through streets, squares and obelisks (the Flaminio obelisk was transported from the Circus Maximus) which, intertwining, would have created a symbolic star. The new paths were only partially built but the idea of rearranging the ancient obelisks is a great novelty because these monuments, in addition to scenically connoting the space, were loaded with precise symbolic meanings. On the one hand, they indicate an ideal continuity of the papal city with the Egyptian pharaohs who transported them to Rome, on the other they are placed in front of the Christian basilicas and decorated with bronze crosses, alluding to the triumph of the Catholic religion over the memories of pagan antiquity.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was called by Alexander VII Chigi to renovate the square on the occasion of the arrival in Rome of Christina of Sweden (1655) to celebrate her conversion to Catholicism with magnificence. Bernini for the awaited guest, added on the Porta Flaminia - access to the square and set in the Aurelian Walls - the wish of a "Felici and Fausto Entrance" (Felici Faustoque ingressui ANNO DOM MDCLV) . Furthermore, he worked on the twin churches of Santa Maria di Montesanto (on the left) and Maria dei Miracoli - at the entrance to the "Trident" formed by via Babuino, Corso and Ripetta -. finally, he worked on the renovation of the interior of Santa Maria del Popolo, a church on the right of the entrance to the square next to the Porta Flaminia, in which important interventions were also carried out by Bramante, Pinturicchio, Raffaello, Andrea Sansovino, Annibale Carracci, Carlo Maratta and Michelangelo Merisi known as Caravaggio.

During the Napoleonic government, a new monumental project was defined, influenced by the revolutionary neoclassicism of Giuseppe Valadier (1762-1839): the square thus took the form of two lateral hemicycles. The buildings near the Porta Flaminia were built and the solution was found to harmonize the nearby Pincio hill with the square, with a project of extraordinary scenographic effect, realizing a series of masonry works open in arches and loggias. An imposing straight road was created on the side of the Tiber, the current Via Cola di Rienzo.