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Abstract: After the Coucil of Trento, cosmopolitism was interpreted as universalism, and any national identity subordinated to an abstract intitution, the Roman Catholic Church. Gregoriy XIII is the first pope trying to shape the urban frame of the Eternal City according that universal cultural strategy, by using just laws and legal proceedings, not an overall urban plan. The main tool used by Gregory to implement his design was the foreign colleges, founded to train missionary clercs to envoy in threatened of heresy lands. In few years, Pope Boncompagni set the colleges of Tedeschi, Ungheresi, Inglesi, Greci, Maroniti, Catecumeni in the city, helped the Scottish one to restore his church, and at last he designed to found the Irish and Armen colleges. In any case, a college was not but a hostel: lectures were taken only in Collegio Romano, which was reformed by Gregory XIII too, and took upon itself the right to represent the universal peculiar character of the whole system. Gregorian works and buildings show the stereotyped late Cinquecento shapes of Giacomo Della Porta, the most peculiar Roman architect of these times. Universal ideology, and formal languge must be settled with the simple everyday functions of a town. The urban place Trinità dei Monti – via Paolina is a specimen of complexity and contradiction in Gregory XIII’s Rome: there acted and fighted French factions (then in civil war), the particular college of Greci, the ambitions of a Medici cardinal, and finally the precious water of Acqua Vergine. Following all these involved paths, the author try also to make original conjectures about church buildings like Trinità dei Monti, Sant’Atanasio and San Luigi de’ Francesi.