S. Our Lady of Peace

Continuing along Via della Pace, past the arch of Peace, as in a theatrical setting you find yourself in front of the church of Santa Maria della Pace . This is a one of the most beautiful and elegant , for architectural forms, of Rome. On this site once stood an older church , St. Andrew of Acquarenari . According to tradition, a gambler in anger after losing their own money, struck with a stone image of the Virgin on the porch of the church, making it gush blood : Pope Sixtus IV wanted to commemorate this event by building a new church. For others, the construction of any kind between 1480 and 1483 , occurred as a votive church in memory of the peace achieved after the crisis provoked by the murder of Giovanni de ' Medici, the Pazzi conspiracy (26 April 1478). The final peace settlement did not occur until November 28, 1482 and December 13 Sixtus IV imposed the name of St. Our Lady of Peace .

The design of the new church was entrusted to the architect Baccio Pontelli while in the early 1500s created the Bramante cloister and convent attached . The church shows a structure outside of the wholly anomalous : With its distinctive semi-circular portico from the feeling of being in a square, but only scenically , because in reality the square does not exist. And ' at the center of a crossroads where the lines of the buildings seem to fold as to enclose and protect the scenery of the church. The cloister, in particular, represents the finest example of the court of the early Renaissance in Rome. In 1656 the facade was built by order of Alexander VII Chigi and by Pietro da Cortona. The dome was added in 1524 and designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and is decorated with stucco work of Pietro da Cortona and paintings by Peruzzi and Carlo Maratta . The interior has a single nave century and is home to the Chigi Chapel was built by Pietro da Cortona on a design by Raphael , who also planned the four Sibyls and the four prophets, then executed by his pupil Timoteo Viti in 1514 . Worth noting also the Cesi Chapel , designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and the Chapel Mignanelli , decorated with marble from disappeared from the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.