by Jeff Filby
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Dome of St. Peter's, Vatican City
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Piazza Navona
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Castel Sant'Angelo
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The Castle of the Holy Angel, as Castel Sant'Angelo is called, resembles the broken base of a giant goblet. Its immense round mass of stone dominates the Tiber River's mid-city bend. This forbidding fortress was once a marble-faced mausoleum, far larger than the present structure, which Emperor Hadrian had built for himself and succeeding Caesars. There were ranks of colossal statues a sky-hung grove of hemlock trees, a slender central tower, and so on - adornments long ago destroyed. A raised passageway runs all the way from the castle across the Borgo to the Vatican. Pope Clement VIII came here along that escape route when Spanish and German troops were sacking the Vatican, together with the rest of Rome, in 1527. The Pope sat out the sack in the castle, which proved invulnerable.
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Dome of St. Peter's, Vatican City
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Piazza Navona
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Western Europe
