Piazza Navona: Domitian's Stadium and the Baroque Legends

The long, rounded shape of Piazza Navona is no whim of town planning: it exactly follows the track of an ancient stadium. Here the emperor Domitian built a venue for Greek-style athletic contests, and on its ruins grew houses, churches and palaces. Today the square is Rome's Baroque drawing room, but beneath the façades and fountains lie stories of martyrs, artistic rivalries and popular traditions that Romans have been telling for centuries.

A stadium beneath the square

The Stadium of Domitian was inaugurated around AD 86 and could hold tens of thousands of spectators, by some estimates about thirty thousand. It was intended for the agones, athletic competitions of Greek tradition, and the name Navona is thought to derive from the expression «in agone» through popular changes. The stands were later absorbed into medieval buildings, which followed its outline. Some remains of the ancient structures are still visible below street level on the northern side of the square.

The square is bound to the memory of Saint Agnes, a young Roman martyr venerated since the fourth century. According to tradition, she was exposed naked beneath the arches of the stadium, but her hair grew miraculously long enough to cover her. On the site of her martyrdom stands the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone, rebuilt in the seventeenth century with a façade designed by Francesco Borromini.

The fountain and the rivalry of two geniuses

At the centre of the square Gian Lorenzo Bernini created for Pope Innocent X Pamphilj the Fountain of the Four Rivers, completed in 1651. The statues represent the Nile, the Ganges, the Danube and the Río de la Plata, that is, the four continents then known. Above the rocks rises an obelisk with hieroglyphs carved in Roman times, commemorating Domitian, recovered from the Circus of Maxentius on the Appian Way.

A famous legend holds that the Río de la Plata raises his hand to shield himself from the collapse of Borromini's façade, and that the Nile covers his face so as not to see it. The story is charming but impossible: the fountain was finished before Borromini took charge of the works on the church. The Nile's veil alludes rather to the river's sources, then unknown.

The August lake and the voices of the city

From the mid-seventeenth century until the nineteenth, on August weekends, the fountains' drains were closed and the slightly concave square flooded. Noble carriages drove through the spray while the people looked on in amusement, in a festival that combined cooling relief and spectacle. This was the so-called lake of Piazza Navona, recorded in prints and travellers' descriptions.

A few steps away stands the statue of Pasquino, an ancient fragment placed at the corner of Palazzo Braschi in 1501. On it Romans pinned satirical verses against the powerful, the pasquinades. Even Innocent X's powerful sister-in-law, Donna Olimpia Maidalchini, entered folklore: according to legend, her ghost crosses the city by night in a carriage.

Strolling through Piazza Navona means walking on the track of a stadium, among the works of two rival artists and the memories of a city that loved to laugh at its masters. The legends that circulate there, even when disproved by documents, show how Romans have always turned art and history into shared storytelling.