Piazza Navona

Landmark · ParioneRome,Italy

A carless Roman oval traced on Domitian's buried stadium, ochre facades around it and three fountains, Bernini's four river gods at the centre.

Piazza Navona opens like a room without a roof, a long rounded oval ringed by ochre facades and the curved front of Borromini's church of Sant'Agnese in Agone. Three fountains stand in a line: Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in the middle, the Fountain of the Moor at the south end, the Fountain of Neptune at the north. Portrait artists set up easels, café tables spill across the stone, and no cars intrude. At dusk the travertine turns gold, and in winter a Christmas toy market fills the square. The oval is not a Baroque flourish. It traces the lanes of Emperor Domitian's stadium, built for Greek athletic games around AD 86 and still buried a few metres below the paving; the name drifted from the Latin for those contests, in agone, into Navona. Market stalls and houses grew over the ruined seating until, in the 1600s, the Pamphilj pope Innocent X reshaped the space into a Baroque showpiece. Bernini's obelisk at its centre was Roman-carved in the Egyptian manner rather than looted from a pharaoh, and four giant river gods sit beneath it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come at first light — before the caricaturists set up, the fountains are yours and low sun rakes across Bernini's marble.
Look up at Sant'Agnese — Borromini bowed the facade inward on purpose, so the dome reads full-height even from close up; most visitors stare at the fountain and miss it.
Don't skip the end fountains — the Moor wrestling a dolphin at the south end came from Bernini's own design, easy to walk past on the way to the great fountain between.
The tables on the square are priced for the address — the piazza's cafés charge for where they stand, and the cooking is better one street back in any direction.
Stack the obelisk on the church — circle the Four Rivers fountain until its obelisk rises directly in front of Sant'Agnese's facade; that alignment is the square's defining frame.

Things to do

1
Walk the line of the three fountains
The square has three fountains on one axis and they are not equals. The Moor at the south end and the Neptune at the north are basins with figures set in them. Bernini's in the middle is a hollowed rock, pierced right through, so you can see daylight under the obelisk. Stand at each in turn and the difference is the whole argument of Roman Baroque.
2
Circle the Four Rivers
Move slowly all the way around Bernini's central fountain. Find each river god in turn — the veiled Nile, the oar-holding Ganges, the Plata with its hand raised, the bearded Danube — then hunt the lion, horse and palm hidden among the carved rock and rushing water.
3
Go beneath to the arena
Duck below street level near the north end into the excavated arcades of Domitian's stadium. Stand in the cool, quiet travertine vaults — the original arena substructure, and the one place you are truly on the ancient stadium floor rather than above it.