Dimensions
131 x 197 x 18mm
A rewarding account of a world-famous building: who built it; what it looks like and why; and how it affects the tourist or pilgrim.
A huge baroque basilica with a dome by Michelangelo, crammed with works of art, standing in a Ruritanian statelet called the Vatican, home of Roman Catholicism, St Peter's is quite simply the most famous church in the world.
The story of St Peter's begins in the 1st century CE with the Hippodrome of Nero, one of two places where the Apostle Peter may have been crucified. 250 years later Constantine the Great marked the supposed site of Peter's tomb in an ancient cemetery (still there in the Grottoes under the church) with a great basilica. That in turn was replaced over a hundred-year period by a series of competitive renaissance and baroque Popes using the greatest artists of their day. St Peter's is apart from anything else immediately recognisable to us all from its recurring television appearances as the centre of the Catholic world. Here Keith Miller offers a rewarding account of a world-famous building: who built it; what it looks like and why; and how it affects the tourist or pilgrim. An intricate history, telling biography and the study of great art and architecture all play their part in a book that is a brilliant debut.
The Wonders of the World is a series of books that focuses on some of the world's most famous sites or monuments. Their names will be familiar to almost everyone: they have achieved iconic stature and are loaded with a fair amount of mythological baggage.
