Vatican, Via Conciliazione from St. Peter's

(2 photos)
The approach to Piazza San Pietro, from the Tiber River is awesome, as one walks the Via Conciliazione toward St. Peter’s, trying to take in the most striking features of the Piazza San Pietro — St. Peter’s Basilica with Michelangelo’s dome, and Giovanni Bernini’s colonnade.

Two different years we climbed the 305 steps of the almost endless, interleaved, precarious one-way staircase, to the lantern at the very tip of St. Peter’s dome, from where this photos was taken. The steps are built between the outer and inner domes, and since the dome curves, we must lean at that same angle — but don’t miss it. This view from the very apex of the dome is spectacular, with a panoramic view of Vatican City, the curves of the Tiber river, and across the city of Rome to the Coliseum, to the right, out of this photo.

Bernini’s semicircular portico of 284 travertine marble columns partially encircle the Piazza San Pietro, and like a pair of parentheses they enclose a fountain on each side of the Piazza, and the obelisk in the center. Above the colonnade of 52 foot high columns, arranged in four rows, are 140 larger-than-life (10 feet) statues of saints. As noted elsewhere, Giovanni Bernini’s father, Pietro Bernini, designed the fountain at the base of the Spanish Steps.
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A view of St. Peter's, from a bridge over the Tiber River.

San Pietro Basilica the center of attraction in the Vatican, was begun in 1506 and completed 120 years later, the largest church ever built. Several things stand out: — its size, its incredibly ornate decoration; and most of all, the light that bathes every corner of the church. The magnificent dome (200 feet in diameter, 630 feet around) of St. Peter’s rises 308 feet above the roof. The travertine marble that covered the Coliseum’s walls was itself “quarried,” and 2,522 cartloads of marble were used to complete St. Peter's Basilica.

Bernini sculpted the tortuously twisted 95 feet tall baldachin (clad with bronze scavenged from the Pantheon’s portico.), holding a gild canopy over the papal altar. Two-hundred feet above, is the spectacular interior of Michelangelo’s Dome