St. Peter's Square is the huge square in front of St. Peter's Basilica. Despite its enormous size, it can't be seen when approaching from the Vatican Museums until you're practically inside it. This is because it's bordered on this side by a colonnade of four layers of columns which conspire to block any view of the interior. This was probably deliberate, as one of the principles of Baroque architecture or decoration was to overwhelm the viewer (suddenly, if possible), and the Square's designer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, was the king of Baroque. And as we entered the Square, after working our way past the souvenir vendors and the forest of columns, the design had the desired effect.



St. Peter's Square is surrounded to the north and south by two curving colonnades that impart an elliptical shape to the Square. The resulting ellipse has a major axis of 1115 feet and a minor axis of 787 feet. The colonnades consist of a total of 284 columns, and atop the colonnades are 140 statues by the school of Bernini, all 10½ feet in height. At the center of the ellipse is an Egyptian obelisk on top of a pedestal and surmounted by a cross, for a total height of 135 feet. At the "foci" of the ellipse (not quite where the mathematical foci would be, but arranged symmetrically) are two fountains.

When Bernini began work on the Square in 1656, the building of St. Peter's Basilica had been completed for 30 years, and Bernini "inherited" the obelisk and one of the fountains. The obelisk was originally created in Egypt during the Fifth Dynasty (around 2400 B.C.). The Roman emperor Augustus had it moved from Heliopolis to Alexandria, where it stayed until 37 A.D. Then the emperor Caligula had it brought to Rome and placed at the center of what came to be known as the Circus of Nero (a huge arena for the entertainment of the citizenry, featuring such events as chariot races and mass executions) on the west bank of the Tiber. Over the centuries, a great deal of Catholic construction (including the original St. Peter's Basilica and its successor) took place near the still-standing obelisk, as this was the area where St. Peter was thought to have been crucified and entombed. In 1586, Pope Sixtus V had the obelisk moved to a prominent spot in front of the under-construction new Basilica. Bernini used the obelisk and the fountain (created in 1613, by Carlo Maderno) in his new square, and had the second fountain installed symmetrically across from Maderno's fountain. To complete the square, a number of dwellings (including a Palazzo designed by Raphael) had to be demolished.

The result was a square where tens of thousands of visitors could see the Pope delivering addresses or greetings from either a balcony above the entrances to the Basilica, or from the windows of his residence in the Apostolic Palace, visible above the colonnade to the northwest. The square was still enclosed by houses and buildings to the east, but Benito Mussolini had these demolished in 1936-37 to make way for the new Via della Conciliazione, which reached all the way to the Tiber as a monumental approach to the Vatican. This opened things up, but also eliminated the Baroque "surprise" when approaching from this direction.



One thing not provided by Bernini was shade for visitors forced to wait in a long line on a hot late-June afternoon. This was our predicament. The next thing we wanted to see, understandably, was St. Peter's Basilica. Admission was free, but to get in, one first needed to go through a metal detector, of which there weren't very many. So the line was long and slow and unshaded and miserable.


One would think that people would be keeling over in July and August. But we managed to stay upright and got through to a shady area after passing through the detectors, and headed for the Basilica.