www.quondam.com/25/2462.htm

In The Architecture of Rome (1998), Stefan Grundmann begins describing Giuseppe Momo's Vatican Museum entrance hall with ramps as "a curiosity in terms of architectural history." Ramps are here taken for granted as distinctly modern architectural elements, yet the Vatican of the early 20th-century was hardly an advocate of the modern. What makes Momo's design even more a curiosity however, is that two ramps, a double-helix, are employed, with one ramp for access and the other ramp for egress.

Giuseppe Momo, Entrance Hall of the Vatican Museum, 1929-32, view up into the hall.

That Grundmann's further description of Momo's ramped hall actually devotes more words to Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum is a clear indication that the two buildings are virtually identical. Nonetheless, it is pointed out that "Vatican architecture served as a model once more, but it no longer pointed the way forward."

[It should be noted that Grundmann's text regarding the Momo/Wright connection reenacts Vincent Scully's text (in American Architecture and Urbanism) regarding the same Momo/Wright connection.]

What has not been mentioned thus far is that Giuseppe Momo found a precedent for his rising spiral design in the Vatican Museum itself. There is a spiral 'staircase', designed by Bramante c. 1504, which allowed individuals on horseback access up to the Vatican's Belvedere Palace (which today comprises much of the Vatican Museum) from the street level several stories below.

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