Basilica di Sant'Andrea della Valle

Work began in 1591 to a design by Gian Francesco Grimaldi and Giacomo Della Porta, funded largely by Cardinal Alessandro Peretti di Montalto, nephew of Sixtus V. Carlo Maderno took over in 1608, widened the transept and raised the dome, which was inaugurated on 6 November 1622. Carlo Rainaldi built the travertine facade in the second half of the seventeenth century. Giovanni Lanfranco frescoed the interior of the dome between 1621 and 1625, Domenichino the pendentives and the apsidal transept between 1621 and 1628, and Mattia Preti the apse; the young Francesco Borromini worked the lantern capitals, whose cherubs' wings form volutes. The funerary monuments of Pius II, about 1470, and of Pius III Piccolomini, early 1500s, were brought here from the old basilica of St Peter's in 1614. The Barberini chapel is known as the Cappella della Tosca because part of Puccini's opera is set there.