Rome's Quirinal Hill is where the greatest concentration of the city's Baroque edifices are located. The Quirinal Palace, now the official residence of the President of the Italian Republic, was built in the late 16th century as summer residence for the papacy, designed so as to offer sumptuous refuge from the torrid heat of the Italian capital.
In this period, popes were the ambitious offspring of Italy's most powerful families, the Barberini, Pamphili and Chigi, all of whom regularly enlisted the skills of artists such as Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, the two great masters of Italian Baroque, to realize both public and private works.
Bernini was commissioned by Pope Urbano VIII to build the Quirinal Palace's Torrione and Loggia delle Benedizioni. Opposite the Palazzo, lie the ancient papal stables, which, after an impressive restyling by the architect Gae Aulenti, now function as striking exhibtion center.
Close by and in the space of just a few meters from each other, we find another two magnificent examples of Baroque architecture, one by Bernini and one by Borromini. Bernini's Church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale is widely considered to be his finest work and for which the artist used vast quantities of gold and marble. For his Church of San Carlo dalle Quattro Fontane, Borromini avoided the use of marble, facing the edifice entirely in stucco. The resulting continuation of concave and convex forms is quite simply, unique.
Not far away, and just steps from Rome's fashionable Via Veneto, lies another of Bernini's masterpieces, the statue of the Ecstasy of St Theresa, in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Bernini depicted the Saint in the moment which she herself had described as being inflamed by the love of God after an angel had pierced her heart. An even better known work by Bernini takes pride of place in the center of Piazza Navona. The Four Rivers Fountain, features four figures personifying the Rio de la Plata, the Nile, Danube and Gange, at the feet of the Egyptian obelisk, previously sited at the Imperial Roma Circus Maximus.
In Piazza Navona, facing directly on to the Four Rivers Fountain, there is the magnificent Baroque Church of Sant Agnese in Agone, designed by Bernini's rival, Borromini and which originally served as private chapel of the Pamphili family. Not far from Piazza Navona, we come across another of Borromini's masterpieces, the Church of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, Rome's ancient university chapel. In this case, the work was commissioned by the Barberini, family to whom the architect paid homage by adopting a hexagonal plan so as to recall the bee: symbol of the noble family. The interior of the dome, with its unusual spiral form, is of particularly worthy of note.
Finally, another work which made the name of Gianlorenzo Bernini famous: the colonnade embracing Saint Peter's square. Four rows deep, with a total of 284 colossal Tuscan columns, the colonnade was designed so as frame the entrance to the basilica and the elliptical area which precedes it. Inside St Peter's Basillica, Bernini was responsible for the funeral monuments of Pope Urbano VIII Barberini and Alessandro VII Chigi, and the stunning bronze baldachin above the high alter, this latter positioned in the place where it is believed St Peter was buried.
