A period of modern art that highlights the Vatican complex as the symbol of the Eternal City. Like the Baroque, he was able to create the last great unitary artistic-cultural style of Christianity. A complex, the Vatican one, which although divided into factories distinct by chronology and typology, is strongly unitary in the conception and meanings that it has assumed for the world. The roots of the new course of Roman art and the birth of the Vatican Baroque can ideally be fixed in the symbolic date of November 18, 1593, when the Christian cross was hoisted on the top of the dome of St. Peter's. Not surprisingly, the political and religious ceremonies, the sumptuous and surprising ephemeral machines that were erected on feast days, responded to a new need: to separate the places of "politics" from those of the "sacred". The moments of the "temporal" government of the city and the state were increasingly reserved for the Quirinale, while the Vatican - Apostolic Palace, basilica and square, connected and unified - became more and more the place for religious ceremonies. The leitmotif of the new style that was being defined in the ceremonials and even in the design of the gardens was "the different" and "the surprising". The authors of the volume illustrate the different themes looking for artistic-architectural connections: the late Mannerist churches of Giacomo Della Porta (Chiesa del Gesù) and Carlo Maderno (Santa Susanna) and the other Berninian masterpieces (such as Sant’Andrea al Quirinale) and Borrominians (for example San Carlino alle Quattro Fontane). Only by describing it in this way, within a powerful cultural and artistic fervor, is it possible to highlight the central and driving role played by the centuries-old Vatican construction site in the birth and codification of the new Baroque style, which from Rome would then spread to the main Italian and Europeans capitals to finally arrive to the new world.