Fountain of the Moro

…Continued from Piazza Navona review: Which brings me back to Piazza Navona, and the stadium built by Domitian. The idea came to him while spending time at the baths built by Nero near the pantheon, which were surrounded by a large gymnasium and an enormous park. Since a large part of the area had been burned in the previous fires, he decided to beautify it by building the stadium that at the time included a musical Odeon at the short flat end of today’s piazza. He then instituted the Agones Capitolini games, which happened every four years like the Olympiads and ended up transforming the roman calendar. He launched them each year wearing a golden crown and a purple Greek-style toga, and rewarded each winner personally by placing a similar crown on their heads. They came from all corners of the empire, and competed in all sorts of sports but also artistic endeavours like poetry, music, theatre, comedy and historical oratory. Not all romans liked the sport competitions, which they considered vulgar since, like in Greece, they were played on the nude, but competitors dressed up after Domitian died and the stadium remained in use for the next 400 years. After that the stadium slowly fell into disrepair, its structure looted of building materials or absorbed into the foundations of the palaces that were built under the outside arches. A small church was eventually built where St Agnes had been martyred, the underground chambers became a subterranean red-light district, while the seating area and the inner court remained nearly intact for the next 1000 years, used to host the thrilling jousting tournaments. At this stage the inner structure was still entirely closed, with only one street running along the short flat side of the large central court, used by the pope to move between St. Peter and the oldest public church in Rome, the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran. And so it was that in 1485 Pope Innocent VIII opened the stadium by building two access roads and moved Rome’s main market here, which had till then been held in Piazza del Campidoglio. Houses started to be built over the stadium’s seating area, and around 100 years later Pope Gregory XIII commissioned the two fountains at either end of the square, one a relatively simple basin designed to quench the thirst of transport animals, the other a slightly more ornate affair for humans to use and enjoy. 100 years after that pope Innocent X decided it was time for a beautiful monument, and the astounding central fountain was built by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.