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Architect Peruzzi overcame a number of technical problems to build this 16th-century masterpiece. Primarily, he had to follow the curve of the foundations of the ancient Theatre of Domitian. His colonnaded portico is an elegant solution along the street side; the other façade is decorated with monochrome frescoes, known as grisaille .

Built around 1550 for a wealthy cardinal, the architect unknown, this palace has one of the most ornate Renaissance façades in Rome, featuring reliefs evoking the city’s glorious past. However, the inner courtyard is the masterpiece, decorated with stucco figures of the 12 Olympian gods and goddesses.

Rome’s first great Renaissance palace (1455–64) was built for the Venetian cardinal Pietro Barbo. It is attributed to one of two Florentine architects, Alberti or Maiano. You can admire the beautiful palm court with an 18th-century fountain from the museum café.

This busy piazza is centred on Bernini’s Triton Fountain (1642–3), the merman spouting water from a conch shell. It was commissioned by Pope Urban VIII and features his family symbol (bees) on its base.

Architect Giuseppe Valadier expanded this site of festivals and public executions into an elegant piazza in 1811–23, adding four Egyptian-style lion fountains to the base of one of Rome’s oldest obelisks. The 1200 BC Ramases II monolith was moved to the Circus Maximus by Augustus then placed here by Pope Sixtus V.

The elongated oval of Rome’s loveliest square hints that it is built atop Domitian’s ancient stadium (see Domitian’s Stadium). This pedestrian paradise is filled with cafés, street performers and artists, milling tourists, kids playing football, and splashing fountains. Bernini designed the central Fountain of Four Rivers, and added the Moor figure to the most southerly of the piazza’s other two fountains, constantly altered from the 16th to 19th centuries.

Bernini’s gargantuan colonnade, 196 m (640 ft) across, embraces the hordes of worshippers and tourists arriving at St Peter’s. Its perfect ellipse is confirmed by the optical illusion of disappearing columns afforded by standing at one of the focus points – marble discs set between the central 1st-century BC obelisk, carved in Egypt for a Roman Prefect, and either fountain: Bernini’s on the left, Domenico Fontana’s on the right.

A perfect neighbourhood square: cafés, shops, a fine restaurant, and a 17th-century palazzo abutting a medieval church, its mosaics romantically floodlit at night. A fountain fitted with shells by Carlo Fontana (1682) atop a pedestal of stairs serves as benches for backpackers to strum guitars and tourists to eat ice cream (see Santa Maria in Trastevere).

The de facto centre of Rome and convergence of traffic patterns, during evening rush hour conducted with balletic brio by a white-gloved policeman. The piazza is flanked by the Palazzo Venezia, from whose balcony Mussolini once exhorted hordes to the joys of Fascism (see Palazzo Venezia).

Valadier carefully designed this view from his gardens, across Piazza del Popolo to St Peter’s (see An Afternoon Roman Passeggiata).