St. Peter's Square

Bernini designed St. Peter's Square between 1656 and 1667 for Pope Alexander VII, solving a genuinely difficult problem: how to create a grand, unified gathering space in front of a basilica whose facade was already fixed and, by most assessments, not ideally proportioned to the church behind it. His solution was the sweeping elliptical colonnade — four rows of Doric columns, 284 in total, topped by 140 saints' statues — which Bernini himself described as representing the motherly, embracing arms of the Church reaching out to welcome both the faithful and, pointedly, those outside the faith.

At the square's centre stands an genuine ancient Egyptian obelisk with no hieroglyphs, brought to Rome by Emperor Caligula in 37 AD to decorate his circus (the site later used for Saint Peter's crucifixion, according to tradition), and moved to its current position in a famously difficult 1586 engineering operation under Pope Sixtus V — an operation so risky that the pope reportedly threatened execution for anyone who spoke during the move, to prevent shouted warnings from causing confusion among the hundreds of men and dozens of horses hauling it into place.