Piazza del Popolo
— where the road from the north first becomes Rome.
Not only on a wall.
“An oval the city built to be arrived at. For centuries anyone reaching Rome from the north came in through the gate at its top, and this was the first room the city opened for them: three streets fanning south from a single Egyptian obelisk, two churches set to look like twins on either side of the middle road. Giuseppe Valadier gave the square its elliptical shape in the early 1800s and ran a carriage drive up to the Pincio terrace on the east side, where the whole space lies below you and the sun sets behind the western domes. People climb the steps to look down on it the way they always have.
Piazza del Popolo, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Piazza del Popolo is a large oval square at the northern edge of Rome's historic center, in the Campo Marzio rione of the Lazio region. It sits just inside the Porta del Popolo, the gate in the Aurelian Walls that was the ancient Porta Flaminia, where the Via Flaminia from the north entered the city. Three streets radiate south from the square in a pattern Romans call the trident: Via del Corso down the middle, with Via del Babuino and Via di Ripetta to either side. The square took its present elliptical form between 1811 and 1822, when the architect Giuseppe Valadier reshaped it and linked it by a carriage road to the Pincian Hill terrace rising to the east.
At the center stands the Flaminio Obelisk, an Egyptian monolith carved for the pharaohs Seti I and Ramesses II more than three thousand years ago and brought from Heliopolis to stand in the Circus Maximus under Augustus. Pope Sixtus V had it moved here in 1589, raised by his architect Domenico Fontana; it climbs about 24 metres, close to 36 with its base. Flanking the entrance to Via del Corso are the twin churches, Santa Maria in Montesanto and Santa Maria dei Miracoli, begun by Carlo Rainaldi in the 1660s and finished with help from Bernini and Carlo Fontana. They read as a matched pair, though one carries an oval dome and the other a round one to fit unequal plots of ground.
The square is open ground, free and walkable at any hour, which is why it fills and empties through the day rather than charging admission. On the northeast side stands Santa Maria del Popolo, a church first raised in 1099 and rebuilt under the Renaissance popes; inside, the Cerasi Chapel holds two Caravaggio canvases from 1601, the Conversion of Saint Paul and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter, and the Chigi Chapel was designed by Raphael. The best view is not from the square but above it: Valadier's ramps climb the east side to the Pincio terrace, where the whole ellipse lies below and, beyond the rooftops to the west, the dome of St Peter's catches the late sun. Until 1826 the piazza was also Rome's place of public executions.