When you have a limited amount of time to see a place it is easy to take in whatever site it is you are seeing with one glance and move on. Piazza Navona was one of those places for me until I had to do research on the fountain there for an art history class. While even in a cursory glance shows that the Piazza is beautiful it is also one of those sites that will almost always be filled with tourists, day or night. It is in the top 10 of all the Rome: Must See lists because of the massive fountain in the middle, known as the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi. Like the nearby Trevi Fountain, the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi draws in major traffic.
Because of this, the piazza bears a painful resemblance to all of the other main tourist sites of Rome, on a surface level anyway. There are a slew of over-priced restaurants around the piazza, men selling bootleg sunglasses and purses and artists selling cartoon drawings of celebrities (lots of Obamas and Angelina Jolies for example) and nameless paintings of Rome. The familiarity of it all can be off-putting. As I said, after I saw the fountain for the first time, I didn’t feel a strong pull to go back and see it again, until I had to do a project on the main fountain. What I found out about it was actually pretty fascinating.
The man who designed the fountain, Bernini, had won the commission for the fountain in a contest held by Pope Innocent X (who had a palazzo on one side of the piazza and a church which he sponsored on the other). The fountain is made up of four male figures, sat on top of realistic rocks and topped with an ancient Egyptian obelisk. The four figures represent the four major rivers of the world in the continents where papal authority had spread. There was the Nile River for Africa, the Ganges River for Asia, the Rio de la Plata for the Americas, and the Danube for Europe. Each of the figures also have smaller details to show an educated viewer which river they represent.
The figure of the Nile has a cloth over its head to represent the fact that no one knew where the source of the Nile was. The figure of the Ganges is holding an oar, to represent how easy it is to navigate the river. The Danube River figure is touching the Pamphili coat of arms since it was Pope Innocent X who had commissioned the fountain and the Danube was the closest to Rome. The last figure, that representing the Rio de la Plata (literally River of Silver), is sitting on a pile of coins to show the wealth that the Americas provided Rome.
The fountain shows what a real presence the pope and the papal state had not just in Europe but in the world. Today the Church is a spiritual authority but in that period it was an earthly, political authority as well. The figure for Rio de la Plata shows this the most clearly, as it obviously references earthly actions of the Church. The Rio de la Plata figure is also cowering—most likely because of the snake (representing loss of wealth) rearing towards it. There is a story however that Bernini placed the cowering Rio de la Plata figure facing the church of Sant’Agnese because Pope Innocent X had given the commission for that church to Bernini’s rival, Borromini. The figure is cowering because it is afraid the church will collapse due to Borromini’s poor design plan.
Finding all of these stories about the fountain made me want to go back and it made me realize that sight-seeing takes effort. Sometimes you have to research and prepare to really get the most out of what you are seeing!