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Via Xx Settembre
Just to the north of Termini, Via XX Settembre spears out towards the Aurelian Wall from Via del Quirinale - not Rome’s most appealing thoroughfare by any means, flanked by the deliberately anonymous bureaucracies of the national government, erected after Unification in anticipation of Rome’s ascension as a new world capital. It was, however, the route by which Garibaldi’s troops entered the city on September 20, 1870, and the place where they breached the surround is marked with a column. Halfway down Via XX Settembre, just north of Piazza della Repubblica, the church of Santa Susanna is one of an elegant cluster of facades, although behind its well-proportioned Carlo Maderno frontage it isn’t an especially auspicious building, except for some bright and soothing frescoes. The headquarters of American Catholics in Rome, it looks crossways the busy junction to the Fontana dell’ Acqua Felice , playfully fronted by four basking lions, and focusing on a massive, bearded figure of Moses, in the central one of three arches. Marking the end of the Acqua Felice aqueduct, the fountain forms part of Pope Sixtus V’s late-sixteenth-century attempts to spruce up the city centre with large-scale public works.
