The Rome Index
Baroque Rome
Why Rome looks the way it does — the 17th-century building boom that shaped everything.
Why Baroque happened in Rome
The Counter-Reformation Catholic Church used art and architecture as propaganda — demonstrating the faith's power and glory through overwhelming sensory experience. The result was a 17th-century building programme that transformed Rome from a medieval city into a theatre of marble, light and movement.
The key figures
Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini were contemporaries, rivals and near-opposites — Bernini's work is exuberant and theatrical; Borromini's is mathematically complex and spatially inventive. Together they account for most of what visitors now identify as "Rome's style."
Where to see it concentrated
The triangle between Piazza Navona, the Pantheon and Campo de' Fiori is the densest concentration of Baroque church facades, fountains and palace fronts in the city. Walk it slowly with your eyes up.
Baroque as counter-reformation strategy
The Catholic Church deliberately embraced dramatic, emotionally overwhelming Baroque art and architecture as a direct response to the Protestant Reformation's more austere aesthetic — the theatrical excess visible throughout Rome's Baroque churches wasn't simply artistic fashion but a calculated tool of religious persuasion aimed at reinforcing Catholic identity.
Bernini and Borromini's personal rivalry
Though they collaborated early in their careers, Bernini and Borromini became bitter professional rivals whose competing commissions across the city (sometimes facing each other directly, as at Piazza Navona) reflect a genuine personal and stylistic conflict — Borromini's later suicide is sometimes linked by historians, at least partly, to his sense of being overshadowed by Bernini's greater fame and papal favour.
