Piazza Navona

Rome's most theatrical square is a Roman athletics stadium wearing a baroque mask. Its long oval follows the running track of Domitian's games below, and around its fountains the city still performs — painters, chess players, church bells and the soft roar of the Four Rivers in the middle.

Why it matters

No other square in Rome explains its own shape so literally. In 86 AD Emperor Domitian built a stadium here for Greek-style athletics — the first masonry stadium known outside the Greek world, as the city's antiquities authority describes it — and the houses ringing Piazza Navona stand today on that structure's foundations, five or six metres below the current pavement. The name itself is a fossil: the Latin agones, "games", wore down through centuries of Roman dialect into "Navona". Onto this ancient frame the baroque age mounted one of its finest urban ensembles — in the city's own tourism inventory, among the most spectacular urban compositions of baroque Rome: a Bernini fountain at the centre, a Borromini-influenced church facing it, and palaces closing the long sides. The result is a public room where sport, faith and spectacle have succeeded one another for nearly two thousand years without the building ever stopping.

What to notice

Read the geometry first: the square's curve at the north end is the stadium's turn, and the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone rises over the spot where, by tradition, the young martyr Agnes was exposed in the games. The remains themselves peek out at Piazza di Tor Sanguigna and beneath the church — the antiquities authority records the stadium at 265 by 106 metres, with double arcades of Ionic columns below and Corinthian above, and notes that the talking statue Pasquino, Menelaus holding the body of Patroclus, was dug out of this piazza. At the centre, Bernini's Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi builds a travertine cliff around a grotto and crowns it with an obelisk recovered from the Circus of Maxentius out on the Appian Way; the four river gods — the Danube, the Ganges, the veiled Nile and the Rio de la Plata — personify the continents as the seventeenth century mapped them, with the papal dove repeated in bronze at the obelisk's tip. At the southern end stands the Fontana del Moro, and at the north the Fontana del Nettuno, both begun by Giacomo della Porta. Sant'Agnese's facade was begun by the Rainaldi and then reshaped so decisively by Borromini that the city counts it among Rome's most magnificent baroque architectures — the famous rivalry story with the fountain's statues, though, is legend, not document.

Context and history

The stadium Domitian dedicated in 86 AD hosted athletics in the Greek manner, a deliberately fashionable addition to Rome's circuit of spectacle. When the empire's games ended, the structure's strength made it a quarry and a foundation: houses rose on the arcades, and the arena's track became the piazza's spine. From the seventeenth century into the mid-nineteenth, the city turned the square's concave floor into a summer lake, deliberately flooding it on August weekends while the wealthier watched from their windows — a custom the municipal tourism record describes as public refreshment. Innocent X Pamphili, whose family palace faces the square beside Sant'Agnese, commissioned the Four Rivers fountain that fixed the ensemble's meaning; Sant'Agnese rebuilt over the martyrdom site; and festivals, horse races and jousts used the oval for centuries. On its southern corner, Palazzo Braschi — designed by Cosimo Morelli for Pope Pius VI as a gift to his nephew, among the last grand gestures of papal nepotism — now holds the Museo di Roma, the city's own historical collection, which keeps the square's festival life in paintings and prints.