St. Peter’s Square, with its ring of columns, symbolizes the arms of the church welcoming everyone – believers and nonbelievers – in its motherly embrace. It was designed a century after Michelangelo by the Baroque architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who did much of the work that we’ll see inside.
Numbers first: 284 columns, 56 feet high, in stern Doric style. Topping them are Bernini’s 140 favorite saints, each 10 feet tall. The “square” itself is actually elliptical, 660 by 500 feet (roughly the same dimensions as the Colosseum).
Though large, its designed like a saucer, a little higher around the edges, so that even when full of crowds (as it often is), it allows those on the periphery to see above the throngs.
The Obelisk in the center is 90 feet of solid granite weighing more than 300 tons. It once stood about 100 yards from its current location, in the center of the circus course (to the left of where St. Peter’s is today).
Think for a second how much history this monument has seen. Originally erected in Egypt more than 2,000 years ago, it witnessed the fall of the pharaohs to the Greeks and then to the Romans.
Then the emperor Caligula moved it to imperial Rome, where it stood impassively watching the slaughter of Christians at the racecourse and the torture of Protestants by the Inquisition (in the yellow-and-rust building just outside the square, to the left of the church). Today, it watches over the church, a reminder that each civilization builds on the previous ones. The puny cross on top reminds us that Christian culture has cast but a thin veneer over our pagan origins.
