Piazza Navona

You walk in from a narrow side street, and the space suddenly opens. Water falls somewhere ahead, more than one fountain at once. The square stretches long and oval, far wider than the lanes that feed into it. Light moves across pale stone and warm ochre walls. Pigeons lift and settle. This shape, this great rounded length, is not an accident.

Beneath your feet lies a Roman stadium. Around 86 AD, the emperor Domitian built an arena here for athletic contests in the Greek style. Such games were called agones, and over the centuries that word softened, from "in agone" to "navone" to "Navona," giving the square its name. The stadium could hold perhaps thirty thousand spectators. They came to watch foot races and wrestling, not chariots, which ran in larger circuses elsewhere in the city.

The arena is long gone, but its outline survives in full. The oval you stand in follows the old running track almost exactly. The buildings around the rim sit where tiers of stone seating once climbed. Walk toward either rounded end and you trace the curve of the ancient field. In a few places below the surrounding streets, arches of the original stadium still stand, buried under later houses.

For centuries this was a market and a meeting ground. Traders called their prices. Crowds pressed between the stalls. And in the heat of August, in earlier times, the square's drains were deliberately blocked so the low center filled with water. A shallow lake formed across the paving. Wealthy families rode through it in carriages for sport, splashing in the cool, while crowds watched from the edges. It became one of the great summer amusements of old Rome.

At the heart of the square stands the fountain that draws every eye. This is the Fountain of the Four Rivers, finished in 1651. The sculptor was Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the leading artist of his age. Four large marble figures sit around a great pierced rock, each one a river standing for a part of the world then known. Water pours from the rock into the wide basin below.

The four figures are the Nile, the Ganges, the Danube, and the Rio de la Plata, each for a continent. Look closely at the man with cloth draped over his head and face. He is the Nile, and the covering was meant to show that the river's source was, in that century, still unknown. The figure for the Plata raises a hand as if startled. Each pose tells you something without a single word.

Above the rock rises a tall obelisk. It is cut with Egyptian-style carvings but was made in Rome in ancient times, not brought from Egypt. Bernini set it on a base that appears hollow and open at the center, so the heavy column seems to balance on air and shadow. People doubted it could stand. It has stood for more than three centuries, through floods and storms.

Behind the fountain rises a church with a sweeping, slightly curved front. This is Sant'Agnese in Agone, its facade shaped largely by Francesco Borromini, an architect who was Bernini's equal and his bitter rival. A popular story says one of Bernini's river gods lifts a hand in horror at Borromini's church, while the Nile hides his face to avoid the sight. It is only a legend, since the fountain was finished before the facade rose, but it captures how fiercely the two men competed across Rome.

The square holds two more fountains, one at each end. To the south is the Fountain of the Moor, where a muscular figure wrestles a dolphin. To the north is the Fountain of Neptune, where the sea god drives his spear into a sea creature while horses rear around him. Both basins were begun in the sixteenth century, and their dramatic statues were added later, to balance Bernini's centerpiece between them.

Walk the length of the square slowly. Street painters set their easels along the edges. People rest on the fountain steps. The cafes spread their tables wide into the open. The square invites you to linger rather than pass through, and in a city this dense, that wide breathing space feels like a gift in itself.

Think of how many lives this ground has carried. Athletes of the ancient world, oiled and waiting to run. Market traders shouting over one another. Carriages splashing through the summer lake. Two great sculptors glaring across the stones. The same long oval has held all of it, age after age, and still gathers people today.

Stand a moment by the central fountain. Listen to the water slide over Bernini's rock and fall into the basin. That sound has not changed in more than three hundred years. When you are ready, choose one of the narrow streets leading away, and let it carry you quietly back into the city.