Piazza Navona site features

You come in through a gap between buildings and the space runs away from you lengthways. Piazza Navona is not a square. It is a long oval, far longer than it is wide, with straight sides and one rounded end — and the reason is that you are standing in a stadium. The buildings around you sit on its foundations; the paving under you is the running track, raised.

Three fountains sit on the long axis, evenly spaced, so the view down the piazza is always a fountain, then another, then a third. The middle one is the loud one: a mass of travertine carved into a reef, pierced right through by a grotto with four openings, so daylight comes out the far side of the rock.

Four marble giants sprawl on that reef, one at each corner, each larger than a person and each in the middle of a movement — one with an arm thrown up, one leaning out over the water. A horse breaks out of the rock on one side and a lion drinks on another. Out of the top rises a granite obelisk, and on its point, a bronze dove.

The end fountains are quieter and lower, wide basins at the level of the paving with figures around the rim, close enough to look into.

Around the edge it is all café tables and restaurant awnings, with caricaturists and painters set up between them. The buildings behind are ochre, cream and dark red, and the one white thing is the church front halfway along — concave, so it pulls back from the square in the middle.

The shape of the square

An elongated oval with one rounded end, because it is the track of the Stadium of Domitian with its shape and dimensions preserved — roughly 275 by 106 metres, seating about 30,000.

The stadium remains

5 to 6 metres below today's street level, and Turismo Roma says still visible under a modern building in Piazza di Tor Sanguigna and in the basement of Sant'Agnese in Agone.

Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi

Bernini, 1651. A travertine reef hollowed by a grotto with four openings, carrying a granite obelisk from the Circus of Maxentius.

The four rivers

Danube — Europe, with the horse, touching the pope's arms. Ganges — Asia, with the oar and the dragon. Nile — Africa, with the lion and palm and its head veiled because its source was unknown. Rio della Plata — America, arm raised, armadillo beside it, on a pile of coins and scared of a snake.

The dove, twice

Two marble coats of arms on the upper rock show the dove with an olive branch; the same dove, in bronze, stands on the summit of the obelisk.

Fontana del Moro

South end. Basin and four Tritons by Giacomo della Porta, 1575; the figure wrestling a dolphin added by Bernini in 1673 — the Ethiopian to Turismo Roma, a Moor to the reference work.

Fountain of Neptune

North end. Basin by della Porta, 1574; the Neptune added in 1878 by Antonio Della Bitta, 304 years later, to balance the Moro.

Sant'Agnese in Agone

Begun by Carlo and Girolamo Rainaldi, completed by Borromini, who altered it considerably.

Palazzo Pamphilj

Girolamo Rainaldi's, with a gallery by Borromini frescoed by Pietro da Cortona. The embassy of Brazil since 1960.

Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore

Formerly San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, erected for the Jubilee of 1450 — the oldest thing on the square above ground.