Sant'Ignazio di Loyola site features

Sant'Ignazio opens off a small theatrical piazza, and the façade tells you what to expect by quoting another church. Two orders of pilasters and Corinthian columns rise to a crowning pediment, with a large window, niches under pediments and cartouches — the arrangement of the Gesù, repeated.

Inside, the room is wide, bright and entirely surfaced. There is no plain wall: polychrome marble runs over the lower walls and pilasters, stucco picks out every cornice and frame in white and gold, and paint covers everything above.

The plan is easy to read. A Latin cross, with three chapels on each side that open into one another, so the aisles behave as a linked sequence of small rooms rather than a corridor.

Then you look up, and the ceiling stops being a ceiling. Across the nave vault, Andrea Pozzo painted The Ascent of St Ignatius into Paradise: columns, entablatures and arches continue upward from the real architecture into painted architecture, and figures spill through the gap into open sky.

At the crossing there is a dome, and there is no dome. What reads as a coffered cupola receding into shadow is a flat canvas 13 metres across. From the marble disc set in the floor beneath it the illusion is complete; walk a few steps in any direction and the painted columns visibly lean, the ring goes oval, and the whole thing collapses into a picture.

That is the moment people come for, and it is repeatable. Visitors stand on the disc, look up, step off, and look up again.

The chapels and transepts hold the solid objects. There is a Monument to Pope Gregory XV, a late seventeenth-century work in the space to the right of the apse, and a giant statue of St Ignatius.

And it is open when everything else is shut. Late in the evening the church is lit, nearly empty, and the ceiling is at its best — there is no daylight to compete with the painted sky.

The false dome

A canvas 13 metres in diameter at the crossing, painted with the perspective of an architecture that is not there. Pozzo's original of 1685 was destroyed by fire; this is Francesco Manno's faithful reproduction of 1823.

The Ascent of St Ignatius into Paradise

Andrea Pozzo's fresco across the vault of the nave.

The viewing disc

The marker set in the nave floor from which the false dome resolves. Step off it and the illusion fails.

The façade

Inspired by that of the nearby Gesù: two orders of pilasters and Corinthian columns, a large window, pedimented niches and cartouches.

The six chapels

Three on each side, intercommunicating.

Monument to Pope Gregory XV

A late seventeenth-century work in the space to the right of the apse — the pope whose nephew paid for the church.

The statue of St Ignatius

A giant statue of the saint the church is named for.

The late closing

Open to 23.30, every day, by the city's published hours.