DK Travel : Rome : History & Culture

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Piazza Barberini

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.
Piazza Barberini

This could be called the “piazza of the bees”, the Barberini family symbol (judiciously upgraded from horseflies when their fortunes improved). Both of the piazza’s fountains by Bernini have large, mutant-like versions of the busy insects carved onto them, to let everyone know who sponsored their creation. The central figure of a triton blowing his conch is one of Rome’s most appealing and memorable, made of travertine that takes on a warm honey colour. The other fountain is a simple scallop shell (see Palazzo Barberini).
Piazza del Popolo

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.
Piazza del Popolo

Rome’s elegant public living room started as a trapezoidal piazza in 1538. In 1589, Sixtus V had Domenico Fontana build a fountain crowned with a 3,200-year-old obelisk – the 25-m (82-ft) megalith from Heliopolis, honouring Ramses II, was brought to Rome by Augustus. Napoleon’s man in Rome hired Giuseppe Valadier to overhaul the piazza to its current Neo-Classical look in 1811–24, a giant oval that grades up the steep slope of the Pincio via a winding road. Valadier also added the fountain’s Egyptian-style lions (see Santa Maria del Popolo).
Piazza della Rotonda

The square in front of the Pantheon was filled with a boisterous daily market until 1847; some of the Pantheon’s portico columns still bear square holes from the stall posts once set into them. The square is now filled with tourists, outdoor tables of cafés, and horse-drawn carriages, all ranged around Giacomo della Porta’s 1575 fountain, which supports a tiny Egyptian obelisk dedicated to Ramses II.
Piazza di Sant’Ignazio

Francesco Raguzzini laid out this masterpiece of Baroque urban design for the Jesuits in 1727–8, creating a stage set of a piazza carefully planned right down to the ornate iron balconies and matching dusty pink plaster walls.
Piazza Navona

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.
Piazza Navona

One of Rome’s loveliest pedestrian squares is studded with fountains and lined with palaces, such as the Pamphilj, the church of Sant’Agnese, and classy cafés such as Tre Scalini.
Piazza of the Knights of Malta

Everyone comes here for the famous bronze keyhole view of St Peter’s Basilica, ideally framed by an arbour of perfect trees (see Knights of Malta Keyhole). However, it’s also worth a look for the piazza’s wonderful 18th-century decoration by Giambattista Piranesi, otherwise renowned for his powerful engravings of fantasy-antiquity scenes. To honour the ancient order of crusading knights (founded in 1080), the architect chose to adorn the walls with dwarf obelisks and trophy armour, in the ancient style. Originally based on the island of Rhodes, then Malta, the knights are now centred in Rome.
Piazza San Pietro

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.