Vatican City [antikvár]

Introduction Vatican City is the smallest independent state in the world. It was founded in 1929 as the seat of the Pope and hence of the Government of the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican, which covers an area of 440,000 square metres, is the seat of the Successor of Peter, and as such the moral and spiritual centre of Christianity. Yet it has not always been the seat of the Papacy: initially the Popes occupied the Lateran Palace donated to them by the Emperor Constantine, who also built the Lateran Basilica. During the Middle Ages, however, the buildings of the Lateran were almost completely destroyed; the Popes therefore moved to the area adjacent to St. Peter's Basilica, built, again by Constantine, over the tomb of the first of the Apostles. We approach the Vatican by making our way along the broad Via della Conciliazione flanked by obelisks, which leads into St. Peter's Square, a masterpiece of Bernini. Here we are welcomed by the symbolic "embrace" of Bernini's colonnade surrounding the piazza. At the centre of the elliptical colonnade, consisting of 284 columns surmounted by statues of saints, rises the Egyptian obelisk of red granite from the Circus of Caligula and Nero. It is flanked by twin fountains formed by enormous monolithic basins of oriental granite: the one to the right erected by Maderno in 1613, and the one to the left by Bernini in 1675. But the chief protagonist of the piazza is the wonderful Basilica of St. Peter itself. This is the modern successor to the original Early Christian basilica built by Constantine over the tomb of the Saint. This was a large and imposing building, but it became progressively delapi-dated in the course of the Middle Ages and it was therefore decided to replace it with a new basilica which was begun in 1506. The initial designs for the new St. Peter's were produced by Bramante, and he was followed as architect successively by Raphael, Baldassare Peruzzi, Antonio da Sangallo and Michelangelo. The latter, recurring to Bramante's original plan, conceived of a huge and monumental Greek-cross basilica surmounted by a double-shell dome. Originally hemispherical, the dome was subsequently elongated by Fontana and Delia Porta. In the early years of the 17th century, Maderno, on the commission of Pope Paul V, transformed the original Greek-cross plan (with arms of equal length) into a Latin-cross plan by a prolongation of the nave which involved the destruction of precious artistic treasures. Maderno also designed and erected the façade in the space of five months. In the mid-17th century Gian Lorenzo Bernini not only designed the piazza onto which it looks, enclosed by two great hemicycles of columns, but embelhshed the interior of the basilica in the baroque taste, conferring on it the sumptuous, appearance that characterises it today. ¦"'l ua I ¦Mi