Two Rival Staircases in One Palace: How Bernini and Borromini Split Palazzo Barberini

Palazzo Barberini was designed after Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII in 1623 by Carlo Maderno, Gian Lorenzo BerniniGian Lorenzo BerniniGian Lorenzo Bernini (1598 to 1680) was the sculptor and architect who shaped Baroque Rome: the Borghese sculpture groups, the colonnade of St Peter's Square and the fountains of Piazza Navona. and Francesco BorrominiFrancesco BorrominiFrancesco Borromini (1599 to 1667) was Bernini's rival and the most inventive architect of the Roman Baroque. At Palazzo Barberini the oval helicoidal staircase is attributed to him.. Bernini's square staircase rises on one side, an oval helicoidal staircase probably by Borromini on the other. Climbing both, one after the other, is the quickest way to feel how Roman BaroqueBaroqueThe Baroque is the art of seventeenth-century Rome: theatrical, emotional and built for the Counter-Reformation papacy. Bernini, Borromini and Caravaggio are its Roman names. turned a palace into a competition between geniuses.

Two architects, one palace

The Barberini palace grew from a family on the rise. When Maffeo Barberini took the papal throne in 1623, the family needed a residence equal to its new position, and the project passed through the hands of three of the era's defining architects. Carlo Maderno began it, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini carried it forward: the institution's own account credits all three with the design.

That shared authorship is what makes the stairs so revealing. Bernini's square staircase answers the classical demand for clarity and weight. The oval helicoidal staircase, attributed to Borromini with caution in the official description, answers a different impulse: movement, compression, an ascent that feels carved rather than built. The two solutions sit in the same building, and neither cancels the other.

Why walk both

A single staircase tells you what one architect wanted. Two staircases, in the same palace, tell you what a generation was arguing about. Rome in the 1620s and 1630s was a laboratory of exactly this argument, and the Barberini project put the argument indoors, where visitors could climb it.

Bernini's square stair rewards a plain reading: broad, orderly, legible from the first step. Borromini's oval spiral, on the other side, changes as you move, the geometry bends, the walls tighten and release, and the top arrives before you have finished reading the route. The comparison is not a verdict. It is the period's own conversation about what architecture should do to a body in motion.

The same rivalry echoes elsewhere in Rome. Borromini's later work shaped the city's skyline, while Bernini's canopy and colonnade define the experience at St Peter's, where the dome climbCupolaCupola is the Italian word for dome and the name of the St Peter's ticket that climbs it. The climb starts with a lift or stairs to the roof and continues on foot inside the double shell. is another lesson in controlled ascent. Anyone tracing the two men across the city can also compare the way Baroque space behaves at the Pantheon, where the dome and oculusOculusThe oculus is the open circle at the top of the Pantheon's dome, the building's only source of light. Rain falls through it onto a floor with drains, and the light moves across the interior through the day. close a much older argument about light and geometry.

What to look for

Inside, the point is not speed. Take the square staircase first, then the oval one, or the reverse, and note how each changes the pace of your own body. Look at how the steps meet the wall, how the landings interrupt or extend the climb, and how much of the route you can see from the bottom. The institution's own description keeps the Borromini attribution careful, which is part of the pleasure: the building has never fully resolved who owns which idea.

For a fuller account of the palace and its architects, see the official page of the Barberini Corsini Galleries at https://barberinicorsini.org/en/palazzo-barberini/. The rival staircases remain the best introduction, because they turn a single visit into a side-by-side comparison of two of Roman Baroque's strongest personalities.

More on the place itself: borromini staircase.