Rivals on the Quirinal: Bernini vs Borromini in Baroque Rome

Two geniuses who hated each other, a pope's bees on every fountain, a crypt of bones, a saint in ecstasy and the palace where popes gave way to kings

Rome · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Sant'Andrea delle Fratte: Both Rivals Under One Roof

   Via di Sant'Andrea delle Fratte 1, 00187 Roma RM, Italy

   Stand in the narrow street and look up above the rooftops at the bell tower of this church. It is unlike any bell tower you have seen: tiers of columns, curving balconies, angel herms with folded wings, and at the very top, a crown of iron and stone like a strange flower. Now glance along the street. A few steps away, on Via della Mercede, is the house where Gian Lorenzo Bernini lived, and died, in 1680.

   The tower was designed by his great rival, Francesco Borromini. So every morning, for years, the most famous artist in Rome opened his shutters onto a masterpiece by the one man he could not stand. The two had started out working side by side. They ended up as the two poles of baroque Rome: Bernini, charming, quick, a courtier, a sculptor who made marble breathe; Borromini, dark, solitary, a stonemason's son who thought in geometry.

   Now step inside and walk towards the altar. On either side stand two angels in white marble, one holding the crown of thorns, the other a scroll. Bernini carved them, when he was around seventy, for the bridge in front of Castel Sant'Angelo. But the pope of the day found them far too beautiful to leave out in the rain, and copies went on the bridge instead. Bernini's family kept the originals until 1729, when they were given to this church.

   So in this one building, you have Borromini's tower outside, Bernini's angels inside, and Bernini's front door across the road. The church has its own miracle too. In 1842 a young Jewish banker from Strasbourg, Alphonse Ratisbonne, walked in here a sceptic and walked out convinced he had seen the Virgin Mary. He became a priest. The chapel where it happened is on your left.

   This walk is the story of that rivalry, and it is played out on the hill above you, where the popes built their summer palace and both men fought for commissions. Head up towards Via del Tritone and on to Piazza Barberini, where the bees are waiting.

2. 2. Piazza Barberini & the Triton Fountain

   Piazza Barberini, 00187 Roma RM, Italy

   In the middle of the roaring traffic circle, find the sea god kneeling on a giant open scallop shell, his head thrown back, blowing a jet of water high into the air through a conch. Four dolphins hold up the shell with their tails. Look between them, and you will spot three large bees.

   The bees are the coat of arms of the Barberini, a Florentine family who struck gold in 1623, when Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban the Eighth. He reigned for twenty-one years, and he stamped his bees on half of Rome. His favourite artist was a young man he had known since boyhood, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and in 1642 and 1643 Bernini made this fountain for the square outside the family palace.

   It was something new. Until then, Roman fountains were basins and architecture. Bernini made a fountain that was pure sculpture, a living moment, as if the Triton had just broken through the surface of the sea. Travertine, not marble, and yet it moves. Every later fountain in Rome owes something to this one.

   Now walk to the corner where Via Veneto begins, and find the little shell-shaped basin on the wall with three bees drinking from it. This is Bernini's Fountain of the Bees, from 1644. The story goes that its inscription proudly announced the twenty-second year of Urban's reign, when the twenty-first was not quite over. Romans muttered that it was tempting fate. The numeral was hastily scraped away... and the pope died a few days before the anniversary anyway. The little fountain was dismantled in the nineteenth century and only rebuilt here, partly with new stone, in 1915.

   Not everyone loved the Barberini. Urban stripped ancient bronze from the portico of the Pantheon, and Romans coined the joke that still sticks: what the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did. Now walk a few steps up Via Veneto, to the church at the top of a double staircase. Its cellar is decorated in a way you will not forget.

3. 3. The Capuchin Crypt: Chapels of Bones

   Via Vittorio Veneto 27, 00187 Roma RM, Italy

   Climb to the church at the top of the double staircase, Santa Maria della Concezione, and before you go anywhere else, look at the floor in front of the main altar. There is a plain tombstone with no name on it, only a few Latin words: here lies dust, ashes and nothing.

   That stone covers Cardinal Antonio Barberini, the brother of Pope Urban the Eighth, the man of the bees. Unlike the rest of his family, Antonio was a Capuchin friar, a member of a strict and barefoot branch of the Franciscans, and he had this church built for his order between 1626 and 1631. In a family that put its emblem on every fountain in Rome, he chose to have his name on nothing at all.

   Now go down to the crypt beneath. You walk along a corridor past six small chapels, and every single surface, the walls, the arches, the lamps hanging from the ceiling, is made of human bones. Skulls stacked into niches. Pelvises arranged into rosettes. Shoulder blades fanned out like wings. Vertebrae strung into garlands. Some skeletons stand in their brown habits, still wearing them.

   The bones belong to around three thousand seven hundred people, most of them friars, collected over several centuries. When the Capuchins moved here, they brought the remains of their brothers from their old convent. The story goes that the earth in the chapels was brought from Jerusalem. It is not meant to be macabre. It is meant to be a sermon. A sign in the last chapel says it plainly: what you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will be.

   Mark Twain came here and wrote about it in The Innocents Abroad, with a mixture of horror and very dark comedy. After the crypt, it is hard to look at Bernini's exuberant fountains in quite the same way. That is rather the point. Now walk back down to Piazza Barberini and turn up the slope of Via delle Quattro Fontane to the great palace on your left.

4. 4. Palazzo Barberini: Two Staircases, Two Rivals

   Via delle Quattro Fontane 13, 00184 Roma RM, Italy

   Walk through the gates and up the long drive towards the palace, and notice its strange shape. Instead of a closed block around a courtyard, like every other Roman palace, it opens out towards you, two wings embracing a central facade of arches stacked like a theatre.

   Pope Urban the Eighth bought this site for his family in 1625, and the work began under the old master Carlo Maderno. Maderno brought along a young assistant, a distant relative from the shores of Lake Lugano, who had started as a stonecutter on Saint Peter's. That was Francesco Borromini. When Maderno died in 1629, the pope gave the job to his golden boy, Bernini. And Borromini, who knew the project better than anyone, found himself working under a man of almost exactly his own age, a sculptor who had never trained as an architect.

   You can see the result in the two staircases. On the left, Bernini's: a grand square stairwell, broad and stately, made for processions of cardinals. On the right, Borromini's: an oval spiral that winds upwards in pairs of columns, light and elegant, almost like a seashell. Two men, two temperaments, facing each other across the same building. Many architects still prefer the one on the right.

   Upstairs, in the great hall, look up. Pietro da Cortona spent most of the 1630s painting the ceiling, the Triumph of Divine Providence, and in the middle of all that swirling sky, giant Barberini bees fly in a laurel wreath, held up by the Virtues. It is one of the most overwhelming ceilings of the baroque, painted to say one thing: God himself chose this family.

   After a few years, the partnership between the rivals broke down for good. Borromini felt Bernini took credit and money for his ideas, and never forgave him. Today the palace houses a national gallery of old masters, including Raphael's portrait known as La Fornarina. Now walk up to the crossroads at the top of the street, where four fountains sit in the corners and a tiny church sits on one of them.

5. 5. San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: Borromini's Tiny Masterpiece

   Via del Quirinale 23, 00187 Roma RM, Italy

   Stand at the crossroads and turn slowly on the spot. In each corner, a fountain is set into the building: a river god, another river god, and two goddesses. And if you look down each of the four streets, you will see an obelisk or a city gate at the far end. Pope Sixtus the Fifth laid out these long straight streets in the 1580s so that pilgrims could find their way between the great churches, and later popes closed the views with monuments.

   On one corner stands the church that made Borromini's name. In 1634, a small order of Spanish Trinitarian friars, the barefoot ones who ransomed Christian slaves, asked him for a church and a monastery on this tiny, awkward plot. They had almost no money. He worked for them for free. And he gave them a building so small, the story goes, that the whole church would fit inside one of the four piers holding up the dome of Saint Peter's.

   Look at the facade first. It is not flat. It ripples, concave, convex, concave, as if the stone were breathing in and out. It was the last thing Borromini designed, and he did not live to see it finished. Now go inside and tip your head back. The oval dome is covered in a honeycomb of crosses, octagons and hexagons, and they get smaller as they rise, so the dome looks far higher than it is. A trick of pure geometry, in plain white plaster. No gold, no marble, no paintings needed.

   Borromini was a tormented man. Moody, suspicious, convinced that the world preferred Bernini's charm to his genius. In the summer of 1667, ill and sleepless, he threw himself on his own sword. He lived long enough to dictate an account of what he had done, and to receive the last rites. He was laid to rest in the tomb of his old master and relative, Carlo Maderno.

   But his ideas outlived him. The friars were so proud of their church that, the story goes, visitors from across Europe begged them for copies of its plans. Leave the palace side of the crossroads behind you for now and walk east along Via Venti Settembre, towards a church that holds Bernini's most theatrical scene.

6. 6. Santa Maria della Vittoria: Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

   Via XX Settembre 17, 00187 Roma RM, Italy

   Step inside and let the gold and coloured marble of the nave wash over you, then walk to the chapel on the left of the main altar. Bathed in light that seems to come from nowhere, a woman lies back on a cloud, her eyes half closed, her lips parted, while a smiling angel stands over her with a golden arrow.

   This is the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, by Bernini, finished around 1652. Teresa of Ávila, the Spanish mystic, described in her own writings a vision in which an angel pierced her heart again and again with a fiery dart, leaving her in a pain so sweet that she wished it would never end. Bernini took her words literally, and turned them into marble.

   Look up. The light falling on her comes through a hidden window above the chapel, and gilded rays of bronze stream down behind the figures. Now look to the sides. In two carved balconies, like boxes at the opera, sit members of the Cornaro family who paid for the chapel, chatting, reading, leaning forward to see better. Bernini made the patrons into an audience. Remember that he also wrote and staged plays. This chapel is a theatre, and you are in the stalls.

   Visitors have been blushing in front of Teresa for three and a half centuries. An eighteenth-century French traveller, Charles de Brosses, is said to have remarked that if this was divine love, he knew it well. Bernini would probably have shrugged: the whole point of baroque art was to make you feel faith in your body, not just think it.

   The church's name has its own story. In 1620 a Catholic army won the Battle of the White Mountain near Prague, at the start of the Thirty Years War, and an image of the Virgin credited with the victory was brought here in triumph. Hence, Our Lady of Victory. As you come out, look across the road at the giant Moses in the fountain of Pope Sixtus the Fifth's aqueduct, the Acqua Felice, finished around 1588. Romans have called him the ugly Moses for four centuries... but without that water, none of this baroque hill could have been built. Now walk on past him towards Piazza della Repubblica, and look for a church whose front is the broken brick wall of an ancient Roman bath.

7. 7. Santa Maria degli Angeli: Michelangelo in the Baths of Diocletian

   Piazza della Repubblica, 00185 Roma RM, Italy

   Look at the front of this church and you will see no facade at all: just a bare, curved wall of ancient brick, rough and scarred, with a modern door set into it. That wall is part of the Baths of Diocletian, the biggest public baths ever built in Rome, finished around 306, where something like three thousand people could bathe at once.

   For more than a thousand years after the aqueducts were cut, the baths stood empty and crumbling. Then, in 1561, Pope Pius the Fourth gave the task of turning them into a church to an old man of eighty-six. His name was Michelangelo. Instead of knocking the ruins down, he did almost nothing to them. He simply kept the vast vaulted central hall of the baths and declared it a church. He died three years later, before it was finished.

   Go inside and you will feel it immediately. The space is colossal, the vaults soar, and eight gigantic columns of red granite rise from floor to ceiling, each one a single block of stone, standing where Roman engineers put them seventeen centuries ago. You are standing in a Roman bath hall that has never lost its roof.

   Now look down. Running diagonally across the floor is a long strip of bronze set in marble, decorated with the signs of the zodiac. It is a meridian line, built in 1702 for Pope Clement the Eleventh by the astronomer Francesco Bianchini. At solar noon, a ray of sunlight falls through a small hole high in the wall and lands on the line, and its position tells you the date and the season. For a century and a half, Rome set its clocks by it.

   There was also a point to make. The papacy had reformed the calendar a century earlier, and Bianchini's line was meant to prove the Gregorian calendar right, and to rival a famous meridian in Bologna. Science and faith, in a Roman bath, under Michelangelo's vaults. When you come out, cross the busy square in front of you to its far side, where the curving porticoes meet Via Nazionale.

8. 8. Piazza della Repubblica & the Fountain of the Naiads

   Piazza della Repubblica, 00185 Roma RM, Italy

   Stand where Via Nazionale opens into the square and take in the two great curved porticoes that wrap around it like open arms. Their shape is not an architect's whim. They follow exactly the line of the exedra, the great semicircular wall of the Baths of Diocletian, buried beneath them. Older Romans still call this Piazza Esedra.

   Now look at the fountain in the middle. Its story begins on the tenth of September 1870, when Pope Pius the Ninth came here to open a brand new aqueduct, the Acqua Pia. It was a proud day for the papal city. Ten days later, the army of the Kingdom of Italy blew a hole in the walls at Porta Pia, not far up the road, and marched in. The popes' rule over Rome, which had lasted more than a thousand years, was over. The fountain was one of the last public works the papal government ever inaugurated.

   The new Italian capital rebuilt this square to impress, with the porticoes going up from the 1880s. And in 1901 four bronze nymphs by the sculptor Mario Rutelli were unveiled around the fountain, each riding a creature of the waters: a sea horse for the oceans, a water snake for the rivers, a swan for the lakes, and a strange lizard-like beast for underground springs.

   They were naked, voluptuous, and very obviously enjoying themselves. Rome was outraged. The fountain was fenced off, the clergy protested, and legend says that some young men climbed in at night to get a closer look. The city kept them anyway. In 1912 the male figure of Glaucus wrestling a dolphin was added in the centre.

   Popes gave way to kings right here, under your feet, in the space of ten days. Now walk down Via Nazionale. On your left, just before the big white exhibition palace, an ancient church is hiding below the level of the pavement.

9. 9. San Vitale: The Church the New Street Buried

   Via Nazionale 194/b, 00184 Roma RM, Italy

   Stop at the railing on Via Nazionale and look down. Below you, at the bottom of a flight of steps, sits a small, plain church with a porch on ancient columns, as if the street had grown up around it and forgotten it was there. Which is exactly what happened.

   San Vitale is one of the oldest churches on this side of Rome. A wealthy Roman woman called Vestina left money to build it, and Pope Innocent the First consecrated it around the year 401, while the western empire was still standing. For more than a thousand years it sat at ground level in a quiet valley between the Quirinal and the Viminal hills.

   Then came 1870. The kings of Italy arrived, and their new capital needed a grand modern avenue from the railway station down to the heart of the old city. Via Nazionale was laid out across the valley on a raised level, with banks, hotels and a vast white exhibition palace. The old church stayed where it was, and suddenly found itself at the bottom of a hole. Popes gave way to kings at Piazza della Repubblica; here you can see what that looked like in stone.

   Go down the steps and, if the door is open, step inside. The walls are painted, from around 1600, with scenes of martyrdom, but set in wide, calm landscapes of hills, rivers and little towns, as if the violence were happening far away in a dream. The reason is the next stop. In 1598 the church was handed to the Jesuits, and it was looked after by their novices, the young men training in the house of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale just up the hill. These paintings were part of their education, gentler cousins of the martyr cycles the Jesuits commissioned elsewhere in Rome.

   So in one quiet, sunken nave you have the fifth century, the Counter-Reformation and the Kingdom of Italy, stacked on top of each other. Climb back up to Via Nazionale, cross it, and take the short streets uphill to the ridge of the Quirinal. On Via del Quirinale, a small oval church by Bernini is waiting, the last word in his duel with Borromini.

10. 10. Sant'Andrea al Quirinale: Bernini's Pearl

    Via del Quirinale 30, 00187 Roma RM, Italy

    Stop on the pavement opposite the little church set back behind a curved forecourt. A semicircular porch on two columns pushes out towards you, like a stage, and above it, a broad simple pediment. It is calm, compact, almost modest. This is what Bernini built when he was allowed to build a church entirely his own way.

    He designed it from 1658 for the novices of the Jesuit order, who trained in the house next door, and the money came from Cardinal Camillo Pamphilj, a nephew of the late Pope Innocent the Tenth. The plot was wide but shallow, so Bernini did something daring. He made the church an oval, and turned it sideways: you enter on the short axis, and the altar is straight in front of you, very close, while the walls sweep away to left and right.

    Step inside. Everything pulls your eye towards the altar. A painting of Saint Andrew on his cross is lit from a hidden window, and above it, carved in white stone, the saint himself breaks through the pediment and rises towards the golden dome, where cherubs and fishermen's nets wait for him. It is one continuous story in paint, marble and stucco, the martyrdom below and the heaven above. Bernini's sculpture again, doing the work of drama.

    His son Domenico wrote that, in his old age, Bernini liked to come and sit here quietly, because it was the one building that gave him real satisfaction. Borromini's San Carlo is only a couple of hundred metres along this street. Two tiny oval churches, almost within sight of each other, by the two men who could not share a room.

    Ask whether the rooms of Saint Stanislaus Kostka are open. He was a young Polish nobleman who walked to Rome to become a Jesuit and died here as a novice in 1568, aged seventeen. A marble statue of him on his deathbed lies there, in coloured stone. Now walk on along Via del Quirinale, beside the endless wall of the palace's long wing, to the great square at the end of the street.

11. 11. Piazza del Quirinale: From Popes to Kings to Presidents

    Piazza del Quirinale, 00187 Roma RM, Italy

    Walk out into the open square and go to the balustrade at its far edge. The whole of Rome lies below you, a sea of domes and rooftops, and on the horizon, the dome of Saint Peter's. You are on the Quirinal, the highest of the seven hills.

    Behind you rise two giants: the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, each one taming a rearing horse, more than five metres tall. They are Roman marbles that stood for centuries in the ruins of the Baths of Constantine on this hill, and somebody was so impressed that the names of Phidias and Praxiteles were carved on the bases, as if the greatest Greek sculptors had made them. They did not. Between them rises an obelisk that once stood outside the Mausoleum of Augustus, and below, a granite basin that used to serve as a cattle trough in the Forum.

    Now turn to the long palace. In 1583 Pope Gregory the Thirteenth began it as a summer residence, because the air up here was healthier than down by the river. Bernini added the balcony above the main door, from which new popes were later announced to the crowd. Several conclaves were held inside. And in 1809, Napoleon's soldiers broke in at night, arrested Pope Pius the Seventh, and took him into exile in France.

    In 1870, after the army entered at Porta Pia, the palace passed from the popes to the kings of Italy. Pius the Ninth refused to recognise the new kingdom and withdrew to the Vatican for the rest of his life. And in 1946, when Italians voted to abolish the monarchy, the king left and the palace became the home of the President of the Republic. Popes, kings, presidents: one building.

    And that is where the rivals belong too. Bernini, the courtier, worked for this palace and its popes all his life. Borromini built for the friars. Today they lie in two different churches on opposite sides of the city, and Rome does not have to choose between them. Stay for the light if you can... at sunset, the domes below turn gold, one by one.