The Alley That Guards Bramante: Santa Maria della Pace and the Arco della Pace

You leave Piazza Navona behind and it takes just two turns for the din to fade. You slip into a narrow alley, the Arco della Pace, and suddenly the city changes tempo: no more stalls, no more queues. Before you a small irregular square opens up, snug as a courtyard, dominated by the curved facade of Santa Maria della Pace. It feels like stepping onto a stage set built expressly for those who arrive on foot, slowly.

The facade is the work of Pietro da Cortona, who in the mid-1600s, at the wish of Pope Alexander VII, imagined a semicircular portico with paired Tuscan columns and concave wings on either side. The effect is that of a stage: the little widening becomes the stalls, the alley you came from turns into the wings. Few know to stop here and look up, and yet it is one of the most scenographic and least photographed Baroque corners of the centre.

The real treasure, though, lies beyond. Beside the church you enter the Chiostro del Bramante, the first work built in Rome by Donato Bramante around 1500-1504, commissioned by Cardinal Oliviero Carafa. Two superimposed orders, essential pillars and arches, no superfluous decoration: classicism restored to its bare structural power. To walk beneath these porticoes, today an exhibition space, is to touch the beginning of the Roman Renaissance.

Inside the church, in the first chapel on the right, the Sibyls frescoed by Raphael in 1514 await you: figures curving around the arch, three young and one old, suspended in a warm light. They are there, free of charge, often in an empty room, while a few hundred metres away people queue for other things.

Come in the late morning or the early afternoon, checking the opening hours of the church and the cloister, which vary. Choose the mild months, avoid the Roman August. And remember the rule of the alleys: walk slowly, raise your eyes, and let the silence show you the way.

Getting there

The church and the adjacent Chiostro del Bramante lie in the alleys behind Piazza Navona, a couple of minutes on foot from the square along Via di Tor Millina or Via della Pace. The whole district is restricted-traffic, so by car it is best to stop outside the ZTL. Several bus lines stop along Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, at the nearby Chiesa Nuova, and from Termini the historic centre is easily reached by surface transport. The nearest airport is Rome Fiumicino, with Ciampino as an alternative.