If the Renaissance rebuilt Rome's bones, the Baroque gave it its personality.
Walk through the city centre today and almost everything you respond to emotionally — the fountains, the theatrical piazzas, the church facades with their swooping curves — dates from the 17th century.
Two men are responsible for most of it: Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini.
They hated each other.
Bernini was the favourite — charming, sociable, employed by seven successive popes.
He designed the colonnade of St Peter's Square, the baldachin over the high altar inside, the Fountain of the Four Rivers here in Piazza Navona, and dozens of churches and palaces across the city.
His work is theatrical, exuberant, and deeply confident.
Rome as spectacle — that is Bernini.
Borromini was the outsider — difficult, solitary, and in many ways the more radical of the two.
His church of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza has a spiralling lantern that looks like nothing else in the world.
San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane fits entirely within one of the piers of St Peter's — and yet feels vast inside.
He died by suicide in 1667.
Bernini outlived him by thirteen years and made sure everyone knew it.
Fun fact: Piazza Navona was built over the ruins of the Stadium of Domitian, which held 30,000 spectators for athletic contests.
The outline of the ancient stadium is preserved exactly in the shape of the piazza.
You are walking on a Roman racetrack.
