St Peter's Square

Bernini built the square for Alexander VII and completed it in 1667, after eleven years' work. The Fabbrica describes an oval space with three centres, 196 by 149 metres, with semicircular colonnades joined to the basilica by arms or closed ambulacra enclosing a trapezoidal area bounded on one side by the facade. The colonnade has 284 columns in four rows, 16 metres high, carrying 140 statues more than three metres high. The Vatican obelisk at the centre came from the circus of Caligula and Nero. A large mosaic copy of the fifteenth-century Mater Ecclesiae icon is in the square; the original is venerated inside the basilica in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Column.