A composite of Baroque Rome: the trident from Piazza del Popolo, the straight Strada Felice from Trinità dei Monti to Santa Maria Maggiore, the Quattro Fontane on the Strada Pia, obelisks at the ends of the streets, and across the Tiber the oval piazza of St Peter’s.
Pope Sixtus V (1585–90) and his architect Domenico Fontana gave Rome the first modern city plan. Instead of rebuilding the crowded medieval city, they cut long straight streets across the empty hills between the great pilgrimage churches, brought water back to the hills with a new aqueduct so that people would settle there, and raised Egyptian obelisks at the ends of the streets as goals for the eye and the pilgrim. Fontana described the work in his book of 1590. The model shows the heart of the scheme: the Strada Felice running from Trinità dei Monti to the obelisk behind Santa Maria Maggiore, crossed by the Strada Pia at the Quattro Fontane, with the Quirinal palace and Porta Pia at the two ends of the Strada Pia.
In the north, the Via Flaminia enters by Porta del Popolo into a piazza where three streets diverge from an obelisk, the Corso in the middle and the Babuino and Ripetta to either side, framed by twin domed churches. In the west, across the Tiber, Bernini’s colonnades of 1656–67 embrace the oval piazza before St Peter’s, with the obelisk Fontana moved in 1586 at the centre. Along the streets stand the palaces of papal families and the three- and four-storey houses of the city, with the Gesù and the oval churches of Bernini and Borromini.
Between the Corso and the Tiber lies the older city the popes built around: the Pantheon, Piazza Navona on the plan of Domitian’s stadium with Bernini’s Four Rivers fountain and its daily market, Campo de’ Fiori, Palazzo Farnese, and a dense quarter of tall houses on narrow lanes. Distances are compressed, and the town is shown about 1730, when the Spanish Steps had just joined the foot of the Babuino to Trinità dei Monti on the Pincian hill.