Among the best-known people who have attended the University of Pisa are Italian Presidents Giovanni Gronchi and Carlo Azeglio Ciampi ; Haitian President René Préval ; Nicaraguan President Adan Cardenas ; Pope Clement XII ; Italian Prime Ministers Sidney Sonnino, Giuliano Amato and Massimo D ' Alema ; Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Ghedi ; Italian political leaders Carlo Sforza, Paolo Emilio Taviani, Alessandro Natta, Enrico Letta, Marcello Pera, Fabio Mussi and Sandro Bondi ; Italian Constitutional Court Judge Sabino Cassese ; Roman Catholic Cardinals Pietro Accolti, Benedetto Accolti the Younger, Francesco Barberini, Francesco Martelli and Bandino Panciatici ; Roman Catholic Archbishop Giovanni Battista Rinuccini ; Nobel Laureate in Literature Giosuè Carducci ; Nobel Laureates in Physics Enrico Fermi and Carlo Rubbia ; anatomist Atto Tigri ; art historian and curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev ; author Antonio Tabucchi ; civil engineer Henry Willey Reveley ; computer scientist Roberto Di Cosmo ; diplomats Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo and Marcello Spatafora ; director and screenwriter Mario Monicelli ; economist Luigi Bodio ; egyptologist Ippolito Rosellini ; electron microscopist Clara Franzini-Armstrong ; geneticist Guido Pontecorvo ; historians Camillo Porzio and Carlo Ginzburg ; intellectual Adriano Sofri ; international civil servant Francesco Cappè ; journalists Lando Ferretti and Tiziano Terzani ; jurists Piero Calamandrei, Francesco Carrara and Antonio Cassese ; linguists Stefano Arduini and Luigi Rizzi ; manager Pier Francesco Guarguaglini ; mathematicians Bonaventura Cavalieri, Giovanni Ceva, Enrico Betti, Guido Fubini, Vito Volterra and Luigi Fantappiè ; neuroscientist Emilio Bizzi ; philosophers Giovanni Gentile and Anna Camaiti Hostert ; physicians Francesco Redi, Vincenzo Chiarugi and François Carlo Antommarchi ; physicists Adolfo Bartoli, Luigi Puccianti, Antonio Pacinotti, Temistocle Calzecchi-Onesti, Franco Rasetti and Luca Gammaitoni ; playwright and librettist Giacinto Andrea Cicognini ; racing car and engine designer Carlo Chiti ; surgeon Andrea Vaccá Berlinghieri ; tenor Andrea Bocelli ; writer Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi.

While rising heavenward, works like the Barberini Allegory are meant to stagger and humble the visitor, who seems to stand over, and not below, a looming abyss of mythic power that threatens to overwhelm the viewer.

His letters to the Barberini family during their period of disgrace and exile ( 1646 – 1650 ) are mined by art historians for information on the archaeological activity of the time.

Pope Urban VIII's family coat of arms, those of the Barberini family, with their signature bees, are at the base of every column.

Many objects from the Barberini art collections are scattered in museums around the world including:

It has been said that he executed at Urbino some of the portraits of great men ( Plato, Dante, Sixtus IV, et al ) which are now divided between the Barberini Palace and the Campana collection in Paris.

With the death of the Barberini Pope Urban VIII in 1644 and the accession of the Pamphilj Pope Innocent X, the Barberini family and their favorite artist, Bernini, fell into disrepute.

In 1627 Anna Colonna, daughter of Filippo I Colonna, married Taddeo Barberini of the family Barberini ; nephew of Pope Urban VIII.

In 1728, the Carbognano branch ( Colonna di Sciarra ) of the Colonna family added the name Barberini to its family name when Giulio Cesare Colonna di Sciarra married Cornelia Barberini, daughter of the last male Barberini to hold the name and grand-daughter of Maffeo Barberini ( son of Taddeo Barberini ).

Maffeo Barberini was born in 1568 into the wealthy merchant Barberini family in Florence, Italy.

He practiced nepotism on a grand scale ; various members of his family were enormously enriched by him, so that it seemed to contemporaries as if were establishing a Barberini dynasty.

He also bestowed upon their brother, Taddeo Barberini, the honorific title Prince of Palestrina ; Palestrina being the comune owned by the Barberini family.

Artistic and architectural commissions included the family palace in Rome, the Palazzo Barberini, the college of the Propaganda Fide, the Fontana del Tritone in Piazza Barberini, the cathedra in St Peters and other prominent structures in the city.

It then passed to the Barberini family collection ( which also included sculptures such as the Barberini Faun and Barberini Apollo ) where it remained for some two hundred years, being one of the treasures of Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII ( 1623 – 1644 ).

* Guercino's painting illustrated at the official Galleria Barberini website ( text in Italian )

German troops and Italian Social Republic | Italian collaborators round-up of civilians in front of the Palazzo Barberini, Rome in March 1944.

* The Black Cat ( 1989 film ) or Il gatto nero, an Italian film starring Urbano Barberini

The papal palace, and the adjoining Villa Barberini that was added to the complex by Pius XI have enjoyed extraterritorial rights since the signature of the 1929 treaty with Italy ; the little piazza directly in front was renamed Piazza della Libertà in the first flush of Italian unity after 1870.

Angelo Barberini ( Luke Kirby ) is the oddball son of Italian immigrants Gino ( Paul Sorvino ) and Maria ( Ginette Reno ), who inadvertently ended up in Canada rather than the United States of America.

It was in Bergamo that the son of an Italian bookseller in Paris, Charles de Breche – who, as a paid agent of the Barberini had befriended Pallavicino a few years before – convinced him that Cardinal Richelieu greatly admired his works and wanted to commission Pallavicino to serve as the cardinal's official historian if he were to come to France.

The Palazzo Barberini was designed for Pope Urban VIII, a member of the Barberini family, by Italian architect Carlo Maderno ( 1556 – 1629 ) on the old location of Villa Sforza.

* Il palazzo Barberini: official site ( in Italian )

The Barberini family were originally a family of minor nobility from the Tuscan town of Barberino Val d ' Elsa, who settled in Florence during the early part of the 11th century.

In the early 17th century, Urban VIII Barberini tore away the bronze ceiling of the portico, and replaced the medieval campanile with the famous twin towers ( often wrongly attributed to Bernini ) called " the ass's ears ," which were not removed until the late 19th century.

Family tree of the 16th and 17th century Barberini ( hereditary patriarchy of the family is indicated by the colored squares ).

Roman copy of a Greek 5th century Hera of the " Barberini Hera " type, from the Museo Chiaramonti

The Barberini ivory, a 6th century ivory diptych representing either Anastasius or Justinian I.

Barberini Ivory, Constantinople, 6th century, Louvre.

The setting of the Piazza Barberini has changed significantly since the seventeenth century.

The Barberini ivory, a late Theodosian Byzantine Empire | Byzantine ivory carving | ivory leaf from an imperial diptych, from an imperial workshop in Constantinople in the first half of the sixth century ( Louvre Museum )

The fine Palazzo Barberini, the Barberini library ( now a core section of the Vatican's Biblioteca Apostolica ), and the many buildings, altars, and other projects spread across Rome ( and marked with the heraldic three bees ) give evidence of the family's wealth, taste and magnificence in the seventeenth century.

He moved to Rome in 1619 and started working for Carlo Maderno, his distant relative, at St. Peter's and then also at the Palazzo Barberini.

In Rome he lived at Via Sistina in front of the Spanish Steps and had his workshop in the stables of the Palazzo Barberini.

Although he himself had never been there, he undoubtedly knew from drawings and engravings of examples in buildings, such as the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, and had already used one to great effect at his Château du Raincy.

Two days after arriving in Rome in February 1933, Merton moved out of his hotel and found a small pensione with views of the Palazzo Barberini and San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, two magnificent pieces of architecture rich with history.

In 1629 he became librarian to Cardinal Jean-François de Bagni at Rome, and on Bagni's death in 1641 librarian to Cardinal Francesco Barberini.

Back in Rome they visited the Palazzo Barberini, and witnessed the celebrations of Holy Week.

His secular architecture included the Palazzo Barberini based on plans by Maderno and the Palazzo Chigi-Odescalchi ( 1664 ), both in Rome.

The composer returned to Rome in April 1634, having been summoned into the service of the powerful Barberini family, i. e. Pope Urban VIII Barberini, the highest prize offered to any musician.

He is best known for his frescoed ceilings such as the vault of the salone or main salon of the Palazzo Barberini in Rome and carried out extensive painting and decorative schemes for the Medici family in Florence and for the Oratorian fathers at the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome.

The Triton Fountain by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, in Piazza Barberini, Rome

Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, or Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins, is a church in Rome, Italy, commissioned in 1626 by Pope Urban VIII, whose brother, Antonio Barberini, was a Capuchin friar.

The Barberini Gospels is an illuminated Hiberno-Saxon manuscript Gospel Book ( Rome, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica, Barberini Lat.

Story's apartment, in Palazzo Barberini, became a central location for Americans in Rome.

Soon after he went to Italy on foot, and was well received at Rome by Pietro da Cortona, who took him into his studio and employed him on the ceilings of the Palazzo Barberini and on those of Palazzo Pitti at Florence.

He gained ascendancy in Rome when the Barberini pontificate of Pope Urban VIII was replaced by that of the more austere Pamphilj papacy of Innocent X.

In July 1812 they moved to Rome where they lived in the Palazzo Barberini.

Five days later Charles IV wrote to Godoy asking him to vacate the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, but two weeks later Charles himself died in Naples.

Giovanni Vitelleschi commissioned Filippo Lippi to paint the famous Madonna and Child Enthroned ( now in Palazzo Barberini, Rome ) for his palace in Tarquinia.

In 1620 Landi returned to Rome, where he spent the rest of his life, where his patrons included successively the Borghese family, Cardinal Maurizio of Savoy, and the Barberini family, who were to be his major employers throughout the late 1620s and 1630s, though he joined the papal choir in 1629 on half-salary.