Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza ★

The swirling, curling lanterns atop the dome of this baroque church plays peek-a-boo with pedestrians on the surrounding streets—good thing, as the church itself is hidden in a courtyard

Beyond a nondescript doorway halfway along the boulevard that parallels Piazza Navona, it a courtyard hiding one of the loveliest baroque churches in Rome, with a soft-serve ice cream cone of a swirling lantern perched atop an oval dome over the concave facade.

Borromini redesigned the courtyard of Giacomo della Porta's Palazzo della Sapienza between 1632 and 1667, surrounding three sides with porticoes and the back with the magnificent curved facade and glowing white drum, dome, and lantern of Sant'Ivo church.

(Palazzo della Sapienza means "palace of knowledge" and this was the seat of Rome's university from the 15th century until the school moved in 1935, originally dedicated to the schools of theology and law during the papal era, home to the philosophy department in the early 1900s, then the school of jursiprudence again until the university decamped to Castro Pretorio in the 30s.)

It's the church you came to see, a geometrically complex and highly influential baroque playground of concave and convex curves is topped by a remarkable spiraling oval latern (atop a shallow dome) that looks an awful lot like soft-serve ice cream and subsequently inspired similar toppers on baroque churches throughout northern Europe.

The interior is nice as well, a lovely, light-filled baroque space with a fine geometric interplay of a triangle and six small circles—the exterior walls follow the concave curve of the circles where they intersect at the triangle's points, but the convex curves of the circles that intersect walfway along each of the three sides. This creates an interior pentagram of alternating curves, leading to an intriguing geometry where the floor plan melds into the equally complex oval of the drum above.

Sadly, the interior of Sant'Ivo is rarely open (just Sunday mornings, and in high summer not at all). However, do not let the church's scandalously brief open hours put you off visiting at all. The best part really is that facade and its unique dome lantern, and it's well-worth popping into the courtyard just for a minute to marvel at it.

If even the courtyard is closed—which, this being part of a government building now, it sometimes is—you can still get peeks of the dome and lantern from some parts of the surrounding neighborhood; see the tip below.

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