Domenico Fontana

Domenico Fontana moved the Vatican obelisk three hundred yards in 1586 with nine hundred men, seventy-five horses and forty-four winches, and the operation made his career. He came from Melide on Lake Lugano, went to Rome as a young man, and attached himself to Cardinal Felice Peretti, building his villa and chapel; when Peretti became Sixtus V in 1585, Fontana became the pope's architect and the instrument of a five-year rebuilding of the city. The obelisk had stood beside the old basilica since Caligula brought it from Egypt and no one had been willing to attempt the move; Fontana lowered it onto a cradle, dragged it across, and raised it on the new base in front of a crowd ordered to keep silent on pain of death. He then re-erected three more obelisks. He laid out the straight streets connecting the pilgrimage basilicas, notably the Strada Felice, which fixed the plan of modern central Rome. He completed the dome of St Peter's with Giacomo della Porta after Michelangelo's death, built the Lateran Palace and the Sistine Chapel of Santa Maria Maggiore, and installed the aqueduct known as the Acqua Felice. Sixtus died in 1590 and Fontana was accused of embezzlement by the successor's administration and left Rome. He went to Naples as royal engineer to the Spanish viceroy, built the royal palace there, and worked on the harbour. His workmen cutting a water channel in 1594 went straight through buried Pompeii without anyone recognising what it was. His brother Giovanni and his nephew Carlo Maderno were both architects and worked with him. He published an account of the obelisk move in 1590 with engravings of the machinery, which is why the method is known in detail. He died at Naples and is buried there, and his Neapolitan work is less studied than his Roman.

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