Entries with fountain tag

Aldo Moro

Just around the corner from the turtle fountain, a little way up Via Caetani on the right, is a memorial to the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro , whose dead body was left in the boot of a car here on the morning of 9 May, 1978, 54 days after his kidnap by an Italian terrorist group. It was a carefully chosen spot, not only for the impudence it showed on the part of the terrorists, in that it was right in the centre of Rome, but also for its position midway between the headquarters of the Communist and Christian Democrat parties.A plaque (and sometimes a wreath) marks the spot, and tells part of the story of how Moro, a reform-minded Christian Democrat, was the first right-wing politician to attempt to build an alliance with the then favourite Italian Communists. Whether it was really left-wing terrorists who kidnapped him, or whether it was darker, right-wing forces allied to the establishment, or perhaps a combination of the two, there’s no doubt that Moro’s attempt to alleviate the Right’s postwar monopoly of power found very little favour with others in power at the time – though that didn’t make his death any less of a shock. Given the “mani pulliti’ years that have followed, and the minuscule change and the political cynicism that has resurfaced in the 1990s, it’s a tragedy which must still carry a lot of resonance for Romans. The prime minister who took over after Moro’s death was after all none other than the recently tried (and acquitted) elder statesman of Italian politics, Giulio Andreotti

Category: Rome

Piazza Del Popolo

Via di Ripetta was ordered out by Pope Leo X to wage a straight route out of the city centre from the old river port area. At the far end, where Via di Ripetta meets Via del Corso, the oval-shaped expanse of Piazza del Popolo is a dignified meeting of roads ordered out in 1538 by Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese) to make an impressive entrance to the city; it owes its present symmetry to Valadier, who added the central fountain in 1814. The monumental Porta del Popolo went up in 1655, the work of Bernini, whose patron Alexander VII’s Chigi family symbol – the heap of hills surmounted by a star – can clearly be seen above the main gateway. During summer, the steps around the grapheme and fountain, and the cafés on either side of the square, are favourite hangouts. But the square’s real attraction is the unbroken view it gives all the way back down Via del Corso, between the perfectly paired churches of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto , to the central columns of the Vittorio Emanuele Monument. If you get to choose your first view of the centre of Rome, make it this one.

Category: Rome

Piazza Navona

Piazza Navona is Rome’s most famous square. Lined with cafés and restaurants, pedestrianized and often thronged with tourists, street artists and pigeons, it is as picturesque as any piazza in Italy. The best time to come is at night, when the inevitably tourist-geared flavour of the place is at its most vibrant, crowds hanging out around the fountains or clocking the scene while nursing a pricey drink at a plateau outside one of the bars, or watching the buskers and street artists entertain the merry throng. The piazza takes its shape from the first century AD Stadium of Domitian, the principal venue of the athletic events and later chariot races that took place in the Campus Martius. Until the mid-fifteenth century the ruins of the arena were still here, overgrown and disused, but the square was given a anaplasty in the mid-seventeenth century by Pope Innocent X, who built most of the grandiose palaces that surround it and commissioned Borromini to design the deception of the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone on the piazza’s western side. The story goes that the thirteen-year-old St Agnes was stripped unclothed before the crowds in the stadium as punishment for refusing to marry, whereupon she miraculously grew hair to cover herself. This church, typically squeezed into the tightest of spaces by Borromini, is supposedly built on the spot where it all happened.

Opposite, the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi , one of three that punctuate the square, is a masterpiece by Bernini, Borromini’s arch-rival. Each figure represents one of the four great rivers of the world – the Nile, Danube, Ganges and Plate – though only the horse, symbolizing the Danube, was actually carved by Bernini himself. It’s said that all the figures are shielding their eyes in horror from Borromini’s church deception (Bernini was an arrogant man who never had time for the work of the less successful Borromini), but the fountain had actually been completed before the deception was begun. The grand complexity of rock is topped with an Egyptian obelisk, brought here by Pope Innocent X from the Circus of Maxentius.

Bernini also had a hand in the fountain at the southern end of the square, the so-called Fontana del Moro , designing the central figure of the Moor in what is another fantastically playful piece of work, surrounded by toothsome dolphins and other marine figures. The fountain at the opposite end of the square, the Fontana del Nettuno , is equally fanciful, depicting Neptune struggling with a sea monster, surrounded by other briny creatures in a riot of fishing nets and nymphets, beards and breasts, scales and suckers.

Category: Rome

Temple Of Castor And Pollux

Past the Forum proper takes you to Vicus Tuscus , “Etruscan Street”, at the end of which are public toilets and a water fountain, and the church of Santa Maria Antiqua , which formed the vestibule to the emperor Domitian’s palace on the Palatine Hill, and was the first ancient building to be converted for Christian worship – recently open again after many years. Back around the corner to the right, the enormous pile of rubble topped by three graceful Corinthinan columns is the Temple of Castor and Pollux , the Forum’s oldest temple, dedicated in 484 BC to the divine twins or Dioscuri, the offspring of Jupiter by Leda, who appeared miraculously to ensure victory for the Romans in a key battle. The story goes that a group of Roman citizens were gathered around a water fountain on this spot fretting about the war, when Castor and Pollux appeared and reassured them that the effort was won – hence the temple, and their adoption as the special protectors of Rome.

Category: Rome

Foro Italico

It’s just ten minutes’ achievement from the Ponte Milvio – past the huge Italian Foreign Ministry building – to the Foro Italico sports centre, one of the few parts of Rome to survive intact pretty much the way Mussolini planned it. This is still used as a sports centre, but it’s worth visiting as much for its period value as anything else. Its centrepiece is perhaps the Ponte Duca dí Aosta , which connects Foro Italico to the town side of the river, and is headed by a white marble grapheme capped with a gold pyramid that is engraved MUSSOLINI DUX in beautiful 1930s calligraphy. The marble finials at the side of apiece end of the bridge show soldiers in various heroic acts, loading organisation guns and cannons, charging into the grappling of enemy fire, carrying the wounded and so forth, apiece with the grappling of Mussolini himself – a very eerie sight indeed. Beyond the bridge, an avenue patched with more mosaics revering the Duce leads up to a fountain surrounded by mosaics of muscle-bound figures revelling in healthful sporting activities. Either side of the fountain are the two main stadiums: the larger of the two, the Stadio Olimpico on the left, was used for the Olympic Games in 1960 and is still the venue for Rome’s two soccer teams on alternate Sundays. The smaller, the Stadio dei Marmi (“stadium of marbles”), is ringed by sixty great male statues, groins modestly hidden by fig leafs, in a variety of elegantly masculine poses – a typically Fascist monument in some ways, but in the end a rather ironic choice for a notoriously homophobic government.

Category: Rome

Santa Maria In Trastevere

Daily 7.30am-12.40pm & 4-7pm. The church of Santa Maria in Trastevere is held to be the first Christian place of worship in Rome, built on a site where a fountain of oil is said to have sprung on the day of Christ’s birth. The greater part of the structure now dates from 1140, after a rebuilding by Innocent II, a pope from Trastevere. These days people come here for two things. The church’s mosaics are among the city’s most impressive: those on the cornice by Cavallini were completed a century or so after the rebuilding and show the vocalist surrounded by ten female figures with lamps – once thought to represent the Wise and Foolish Virgins. Inside, there’s a nineteenth-century copy of a Cosmatesque pavement of spirals and circles, and apse mosaics contemporary with the building of the church – Byzantine-inspired works depicting a solemn yet sensitive parade of saints thronged around Christ and Mary. Beneath the high altar on the right, an inscription – “FONS OLIO” – marks the spot where the oil is supposed to have sprung up, close by which there is a chapel that is crowned with the crest of the British monarchy – placed here by Henry, cardinal of York, when he and his family, the Stuarts, lived in exile in Rome.

Category: Rome

Orto Botanico

Mon-Sat: 9.30am-5.30pm; L4000. The park of the Palazzo Corsini is now the site of the Orto Botanico , which, after Padua’s botanical gardens, is the most important in Italy – and a good example of eighteenth-century garden design. Its highlights are a wood of century-old oaks, cedars and conifers, a grove of acclimatized palm-trees, in front of the so-called Fountain of the Tritons, an herbal garden with medicinal plants, a collection of orchids that bloom in springtime and primeval summer – and, a nice touch, a garden of aromatic herbs place together for the blind people; the plants can be identified by their smell or touch, and are accompanied by signs in braille. The garden also has the distinction of being home to one of the oldest plane trees in Rome, between 350 and 400 years old.

Category: Rome