This is Piazza Trinità dei Monti, accessible through the posh, tourist-crowded Piazza de Spagna and its famous stairs. If you want to avoid a massive amount of people, including armies of poseurs creating no-trespass spaces between them and the shooter, sellers of useless gadgets and fiakers, then you should arrive from Piazza Barberini, and the go up Via Sistina. Once you arrive to the end of that road, you will find yourself in front of the church Trinità dei Monti, looking down at the stairs and the crowd surrounding (probably covering) the beautiful Fontana della Barcaccia.
One of these days I found myself observing an element of this architectonic complex that establishes a beautiful harmony created by the dissimilarity of stiles present at that space, as in so many other places in Rome. The “Egyptian” obelisk that pontificates in front of the church is way less eye-catching than all the other dominant elements, but this particularity makes it both essential and foreign to the beauty of the place. It’s dissimilitude lies upon the plain geometry of its lines and of its hieroglyphic representations, while the church, the stairs and the fountain express an ideal of overwhelming, wavy and eccentric beauty. This exceptional element provides a evanescent feeling of surprise in the midst of one of the most visited places in the world. There is something very unclear and conflictual about the kind of object that the obelisk is, as opposed with the aspects of domination, expression of ideals and seeking of pure visual impact that the rest of the piazza suggests.
