Culture > Monuments > 2466 ๐Ÿ”—

Palazzo del Quirinale

Piazza del Quirinale - 00187 Rome โคท
Trevi [R.II]
Centro Storico [1A]

It's been the official residence of the President of the Republic since 1947. Since 1870, the year of the unity of Italy, it had already been the palace of Savoia sovereigns.

Founded as the Popes' summer residence, il Palazzo del Quirinale was started in 1573 by Gregorio XIII on the site of a villa of the Cardinal Ippolito d'Este (the son of the duke Alfonso and Lucrezia Borgia) which already belonged to the Carafa.

Many masters worked here. The first among them was Martino Longhi il Vecchio (1573-1577) who built Tower of the Winds. In 1587 he was replaced by Ottaviano Mascherino and then by Domenico Fontana who created the wide courtyard with an arcade.
After them Flainio Ponzio, Carlo Maderno got to work following one each other. Later Gian Lorenzo Bernini created the entrance portal, the Paolina Chapel as big as the Sistina one,the lodge of the Blessings and the Torrione on the left of the façade. The palace was completed by Federico Fuga under Clement XII (1730-1740), but only in 1592 Clement VIII went to live there and after him all the Popes until the year of 1870 when the Savoia entered the palace.

The wide façade of the late Renaissance has two floors with windows, the flat arch and the tympanum. On the left side low buildings and the circular bulwark hide the lower part. On the right there is the big portal of C.Maderno. Between two columns holding a rich arched tympanum one can notice the broken frame on which the statues of San Pietro (Stefano Maderno) and San Paolo (Guglielmo Berthelot) of 1615 are set on. Above there is the big balcony flanked by pilaster strip, adorned by Madonna with the Child (1635,Pompeo Ferrucci) in the middle of the broken tympanum.

On the right along the Via del Quirinale there is the prolongation of the Palazzo del Quirinale called Mancia lunga. It is the monotonous building of 360 meters built by several stages and thanks to Alessandro VII, then to Innocent XII and Clement XII it was finished in 1733 with a palace of two orders and Bugnati corners of Fuga.

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