Corso Vittorio Tureen – Fontana della Terrina

There are monuments that earn their name in books and monuments that pick it up in the street. The fountain that stands today in Piazza della Chiesa Nuova, on the north side of Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, belongs without question to the second category. In the records of the Rome city administration it appears as the Fontana della Terrina. In spoken Roman it's the zuppiera di Corso Vittorio, and anyone who has known it forever simply calls it the zuppiera with nothing added. It's one of the very few cases where the popular nickname has not only survived the centuries but has ended up imposing itself as the unofficial name, understood by everyone, while the learned name stays confined to captions.

Where the Corso Vittorio Tureen Is and How to Really Get There

The fountain is in Rome, in the Parione district, in Piazza della Chiesa Nuova, along the northern side of Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, practically opposite the entrance of the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, the one everyone calls the Chiesa Nuova. On the opposite side of the corso, a few dozen meters toward the Tiber, rises the bulk of the Palazzo della Cancelleria. It's a spot almost everyone crosses and almost no one looks at, because in that stretch the corso works as a through artery and people walking tend to keep their eyes either up, on the facades, or down, on the narrow sidewalks.

To reach it on foot from Piazza Navona takes less than five minutes: you leave from Via di Pasquino side, take Via del Governo Vecchio and follow it until you come out on the corso, or cut through from Via dei Banchi Nuovi. From Campo de’ Fiori it takes seven or eight, crossing Piazza della Cancelleria and the corso itself. From Largo Torre Argentina, where most of the center's surface lines are concentrated, you walk along the corso the whole way for about 10 minutes, with the Basilica of Sant’Andrea della Valle as the first landmark and the Museo di Roma at Palazzo Braschi as the second.

If you're coming by public transport, get off at Largo Argentina or at the stops along Corso Vittorio, served by several bus lines that run the axis from Piazza Venezia toward the Vatican. The metro doesn't come through here: the two main lines graze the historic center but don't cross it, and this is one of the reasons why this part of Rome remains, paradoxically, harder to reach than much more peripheral neighborhoods. Coming from Termini station you face either a bus change or a walk of about 30 minutes, which however crosses half of monumental Rome and is worth the effort.

By car, the short answer is that it's not worth trying. The whole area falls within the historic center's limited traffic zone, the parking spaces along the corso are reserved, and the nearest garages are at the Janiculum or toward the lungotevere. Those arriving with an organized group are normally dropped off near Lungotevere dei Tebaldi or in front of Castel Sant’Angelo, and from there you continue on foot.

A detail it's good to know in advance: the fountain can't be seen from far away. It doesn't rise up like the monumental fountains you expect to find in Rome, it has no high jets, it makes no sound of water you can hear from the opposite sidewalk. It sits in the middle of a square basin sunk below street level, so anyone passing by bus almost always misses it, and even those on foot notice it only when they're already at the parapet. This lowering is not an aesthetic choice: it appears to be tied to the water pressure problems of the spot where the fountain was repositioned, and it has shaped how it is perceived forever.

What This Fountain Really Is: A Sixteenth-Century Basin Under a Seventeenth-Century Lid

The most widespread confusion concerns the very nature of the object. Many take it for granted that the fountain was born like this, with that rounded, flattened profile that recalls a tureen from the dinner table. That is not how it went. What you see today is the sum of two interventions separated by more than 30 years, conceived by different hands and with opposite intentions.

The Original Basin

The primary element appears to be the work of Giacomo della Porta, the architect who between the 1580s and 1590s equipped Rome with most of its public fountains. The sources of the Sovraintendenza Capitolina place its construction within the span 1581-1595, while the date most often cited in the literature is 1590. The patron appears to be Pope Gregory XIII Boncompagni, who however died in 1585, and therefore before the work was completed. It's worth fixing this point, because in the records in circulation you sometimes read of a nonexistent Gregory XII Boncompagni: the correct numeral is the thirteenth.

The inner basin was of white marble, rounded in shape, resting on a stepped base. Four bronze dolphins were placed on the rim. These dolphins have a story of their own, and a rather tasty one: they had been cast a couple of years earlier for the fountain in Piazza Mattei, the one with the turtles, and were never mounted there. Della Porta recovered them and reused them at Campo de’ Fiori. It's the kind of site economy that was current practice in the Rome of the popes and that today we would call reuse, with an air far more virtuous than was in the intentions.

The Lid

The second intervention comes in 1622 and changes everything. An enormous travertine lid with a dome profile, with a big knob at the center, was lowered onto the basin and closed it. The author remains unknown: no reliable source names him, and anyone who attributes it to one sculptor or another is adding something the documents don't say. From that moment the fountain took on the profile that gave it its name, and the four bronze dolphins, removed on the same occasion, are lost.

The Sum of the Two

The result is an involuntary hybrid. A Renaissance fountain designed to be looked at from above and from the sides, with a light play of water and four zoomorphic bronze elements, reduced to a closed container from which the water comes out through a side hole. No architect would have designed something like it starting from scratch. And yet the result, after four centuries, has its own obviousness: it's recognizable in half a second, it can be told in a sentence and it resembles nothing else in the city. Art history classifies it as an alteration. The city considers it a monument in its own right.

Giacomo della Porta and Rome's Public Fountain Program

To understand why this basin existed, you have to widen the view. Giacomo della Porta, born in 1532 and died in Rome on September 3, 1602, is one of the decisive figures in the passage from the mature Renaissance to the early Baroque. He had studied in the orbit of Michelangelo and Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, completed with Domenico Fontana the dome of St. Peter's after Michelangelo's death, designed the facade of the Church of the Gesù, worked on the Palazzo Senatorio on the Capitoline Hill and closed his career at Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati.

Alongside this monumental output he carried out another, less showy and more consequential for the daily life of Romans: the program of public fountains. In the sixteenth century the restoration of the ancient aqueducts had put running water back into a city that for centuries had depended on the Tiber and on wells. The water had to be distributed, and the way to distribute it was to build delivery points in the squares. Della Porta found himself in the position of designing a series of them, within a handful of years, with a coherent language: polygonal or mixtilinear basins, steps, superimposed bowls, little sculptural apparatus and a lot of geometry.

Anyone strolling through the center today meets that program without realizing it. The two side fountains of Piazza Navona are his, and were built decades before Gian Lorenzo Bernini placed the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the center of the square. His is the fountain in Piazza della Rotonda in front of the Pantheon, his the one in Piazza Colonna, his the design of the Turtle Fountain in Piazza Mattei, later completed by other hands. And his was the basin of Campo de’ Fiori that, once covered, became the zuppiera.

The consequence is that this monument, which today seems an isolated anomaly, belongs to the same family of objects as half a dozen fountains that visitors photograph every day without connecting them to one another. Anyone who wanted to build a themed itinerary on water in Rome has material for a whole day, moving from della Porta's sixteenth-century basins to the Baroque machines of the Trevi Fountain, the Triton Fountain, the Barcaccia Fountain and the scenic giant of the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola on the Janiculum.

There's a coincidence worth recording, which almost no guide lines up. Della Porta also worked on the design of the interiors of the Chiesa Nuova, in the phase of works straddling the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The fountain that stands today in front of that church, arrived there by chance and more than three centuries late, therefore has the same author as part of the building facing it. Nobody planned it: it happened. But when you tell it to a group, the square changes weight.

A Curiosity About the Corso Vittorio Tureen - Fontana della Terrina

The popular name was not born right away. The sources agree that the nickname took hold several years after construction, and in any case only after 1622, that is, after the arrival of the lid. Before that date the fountain was simply the fountain of Campo de’ Fiori, a useful object with no particular distinguishing features in a square that already had plenty of them.

The curious thing is that the nickname was born as an insult. The Romans did not like the 1622 operation at all. A fountain from which you could no longer draw water comfortably, with a closed bowl and a side hole from which the water trickled instead of spurting, was perceived as a ruined fountain, and the people reacted the way they have always reacted in this city: with a name. Calling it a zuppiera meant saying it was no longer a fountain but an enlarged kitchen object, good for serving soup and not for giving the square water.

Four centuries later, that insult has become the only reason the fountain is remembered. If the lid had never arrived, today we would be facing one of the many sixteenth-century basins of the center, correct, elegant and perfectly forgettable, and nobody would take a photograph of it. The aesthetic damage the Romans of the 1600s denounced has produced, in the long run, the identity of the monument. It's a lesson repeated in Rome more often than you'd think: the Colosseum owes part of its shape to plundering, and this fountain owes its name to an intervention that contemporaries judged wrong.

It's worth adding a linguistic note. Terrina and zuppiera are not perfect synonyms. The terrina, in the Italian tradition, is the deep terracotta or porcelain vessel in which you mix or serve. The zuppiera is the container with a lid that arrives at the table with the soup inside. The official name uses the first term, the Roman uses the second, and the Roman is right: the lid is there, and the lid is the whole point.

The 1622 Lid and the Inscription Almost Everyone Transcribes Wrong

On the collar at the base of the central knob runs an inscription that is, along with the profile, the most cited element of the monument. The text is the following, in capitals as on the stone:

AMA DIO E NON FALLIRE. FA DEL BENE E LASSA DIRE. MDCXXII

Two clarifications. The first concerns the verb: the carved form is lassa, not lascia. It is the Romanesco variant of the verb lasciare, and the transcription into modern Italian that circulates in many records erases precisely its most interesting feature. The second concerns the date: MDCXXII corresponds to 1622, and it is the date of the lid's making, not of the fountain. Anyone who reads that figure believing they are reading the date of the fountain is off by more than 30 years.

What It Means

The sense is a moral proverb of popular tradition, of the same stock as the many mottoes carved on lintels and doorways all over Italy between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: behave well, do your duty and don't mind the gossip. It's not an author's quotation, it's not a line of Dante and it's not a papal phrase. It's everyday wisdom, the kind that was written over house doors and on fireplaces.

Why Right There

Here enters the reading that makes the inscription much more interesting than a generic invitation to virtue. The lid was put on to stop the basin from continuing to be used as a washing place for the market's vegetables and as a collector of organic waste. The patron knew perfectly well that the operation would stir up protests. Carving on the lid a motto that invites doing good and ignoring criticism, right on the object that generates the criticism, is a choice that looks a lot like an advance reply. There is no document confirming it, so I present it for what it is, a reading, but it's hard not to think of it when you lean over the parapet to read the letters.

How to Read It on Site

The inscription runs along the base of the knob and, from sidewalk level, is awkward. It's best to approach the parapet from the side facing the Chiesa Nuova and wait for a raking light, which brings the letters out of the background. With the sun directly overhead the stone flattens and the carvings disappear. A modest telephoto lens solves the problem in an instant, but even to the naked eye, with the right light, the text can be read.

Something Nobody Tells You About the Corso Vittorio Tureen - Fontana della Terrina

The fountain you see today at Campo de’ Fiori is not this one. It seems obvious put that way, but in practice it generates a notable amount of misunderstanding, because in that square a fountain of similar shape really does exist, and many photograph it convinced they have the original in front of them.

The sequence of facts is this. In 1889 della Porta's basin was removed from the center of Campo de’ Fiori to make room for the monument to Giordano Bruno by Ettore Ferrari, inaugurated on June 9 of that year on one of the tensest days in the relations between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See. Dismantled, the fountain ended up in the municipal warehouses, where it stayed for about 25 years. Only in 1924 did the city administration decide to reassemble it in Piazza della Chiesa Nuova, where it still stands.

At Campo de’ Fiori, however, a basin of the same design remains. Already in the mid-nineteenth century, when the square was enlarged to the north with the demolition of the houses between Via dei Baullari and Vicolo del Gallo, a copy was moved to the newly reclaimed portion of space. It's the one you see today on the short side of the square, behind the stalls, and which Romans have always used as a place to rest their shopping bags.

The result is an almost comic situation: the original is in a square almost nobody associates with fountains, and the copy is in the square where everyone looks for the original. Anyone who wants to see the sixteenth-century stone and the 1622 travertine has to come here, on the corso. Anyone who stays at Campo de’ Fiori photographs an excellent reproduction in a much more photogenic setting.

There's a second misunderstanding, rarer but persistent, concerning provenance. The idea circulates that the fountain comes from the Campo Vaccino, that is, from the name the Roman Forum bore before the nineteenth-century excavations. Nothing of the kind appears in the sources consulted: the documented provenance is Campo de’ Fiori, and the confusion almost certainly arises from the assonance between the two place names, both opening with the word campo. The Campo Vaccino had its fountains, but not this one.

One last note, of the kind that changes the way you look at an object. The 25 years in storage were not a bureaucratic accident: they were the period in which the fountain seriously risked never coming back. Between 1889 and 1924 Rome went through the Umbertine building fever, the First World War and the start of the regime, and into the municipal depots of those years went many pieces that never resurfaced. That a sixteenth-century basin with a seventeenth-century lid survived that quarter of a century, dismantled into numbered pieces, and was then correctly reassembled, is a small case of administrative luck.

My Advice for Visiting the Corso Vittorio Tureen - Fontana della Terrina

The main advice is counterintuitive: don't come here for the fountain. Coming here for the fountain means arriving, looking at a travertine bowl for 90 seconds, taking two photographs and leaving with the feeling of having wasted time. The zuppiera handles the role of destination badly and handles the role of stop very well.

How to Fit It Into a Route

The ideal placement is in the middle of a crossing of the center on the east-west axis. You start from Largo Argentina, go up Corso Vittorio with a stop at Sant’Andrea della Valle, detour 100 meters for Palazzo Braschi and Piazza Navona, return to the corso, reach the Chiesa Nuova, go in to see the three Rubens altarpieces and the motorized painting of the Madonna della Vallicella, come out, cross over and look at the fountain with the Palazzo della Cancelleria behind you. From there you continue toward the Tiber and Castel Sant’Angelo. In this scheme the fountain is not the prize: it's the point where you catch your breath between two interiors and put in order what you've seen.

The Time of Day

Early in the morning, before 9, or after sunset. The reason is banal and decisive: Corso Vittorio is a heavy traffic axis, and in the middle hours the noise makes any spoken explanation impossible. In the early morning Piazza della Chiesa Nuova is almost silent, the bar on the corner works for the residents and the light comes in raking from the east, which is exactly what you need to read the inscription.

The Honest Duration

10 minutes at the fountain, 20 if you stop to read the text on the lid and tell the story of the move, and from there you continue. Anyone planning an hour in this square is overestimating. Anyone planning three minutes, on the other hand, would do better not to stop at all, because the monument without its story is in fact not very interesting: it's a simple form, without sculptures, without spectacular jets and without staging. Everything it has to give comes through the telling.

Crossing the Corso

Last practical note, and it's not trivial. Crossing Corso Vittorio in this stretch should be done at the signalized crosswalks. Traffic moves at speed, there are more than two lanes per direction in some places and public transport arrives in waves. Anyone traveling with children or elderly people should take the long way around to the traffic light, which costs 40 seconds and saves a risk that makes no sense to run.

Piazza della Chiesa Nuova, the Cancelleria and the Corso Between Them

The context matters more than the monument, and it's worth giving it space. Piazza della Chiesa Nuova is not a historic square in the sense that Navona or Campo de’ Fiori are. It's a leftover space, produced by the nineteenth-century gutting that opened Corso Vittorio Emanuele II through the medieval and Renaissance fabric of Parione and Regola. Before that operation the Chiesa Nuova faced a modest widening, tucked among narrow alleys. Afterward, it found itself serving as the backdrop to an urban artery twice as wide as any street in the district.

The Chiesa Nuova

Santa Maria in Vallicella came out of the initiative of Filippo Neri, who had founded the Congregation of the Oratory in 1551, officially recognized in 1575. In that same 1575 Gregory XIII entrusted the old church of the Vallicella to his followers, and work on the new building started immediately: the first Mass was celebrated in 1577. Working on the site in succession were Matteo di Città di Castello, Martino Longhi the Elder from 1586, Giacomo della Porta for the interior modifications between the end of the century and the first years of the 1600s, and Carlo Maderno, to whom the crowning is attributed with good probability. The facade, designed by Fausto Rughesi, was begun in 1594 and finished in 1605.

Inside, the vault, the dome and the apse carry the frescoes of Pietro da Cortona, executed between 1647 and 1666, one of the most important decorative undertakings of the Roman 1600s. On the high altar and the walls of the presbytery are the three panels that Peter Paul Rubens painted on slate in 1608. At the center is the fourteenth-century image of the Madonna della Vallicella, venerated as miraculous after, according to tradition, it bled following a blow received in 1535, protected by a movable copper panel that is lowered and raised by a mechanism. It's that mechanism that gives the whole thing the nickname of motorized painting.

The Oratorio dei Filippini

To the left of the church, looking at it head-on, stands the Oratorio dei Filippini, which Francesco Borromini designed between 1638 and 1642. The concave brick facade is one of the most refined exercises of Roman Baroque architecture, and the clock tower that finishes it toward Via del Governo Vecchio is one of the most recognizable elements of Parione's low skyline. Anyone who has seen the fountain and raises their eyes by 45 degrees has in front of them, in the same field of view, della Porta, Rughesi and Borromini.

The Palazzo della Cancelleria

On the other side of the corso, toward the south, stretches the Palazzo della Cancelleria, built between the late fifteenth century and the early sixteenth for Cardinal Raffaele Riario. It's one of the first fully Renaissance palaces of Rome, faced in travertine according to a practice of reuse from ancient monuments that at the time scandalized nobody, with a porticoed courtyard of great balance traditionally linked to the name of Bramante. Incorporated into the palace is the basilica of San Lorenzo in Damaso, one of the oldest churches in the city, rebuilt together with the palace. The building today enjoys Vatican extraterritoriality.

The Corso

Corso Vittorio Emanuele II was opened after the annexation of Rome to the Kingdom of Italy, to connect Piazza Venezia to the bridge over the Tiber and thus to the Vatican, and the work proceeded in phases through the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. The cut destroyed an enormous amount of historic fabric, moved facades, set buildings back and left behind it a sequence of leftover squares like this one. Judging it is complicated: without the corso, half of monumental Rome would today be unreachable to anyone unwilling to walk. With the corso, the Parione district lost a substantial part of its weave.

Another Well-Known Fact, Yet Rarely Mentioned

That the fountain was used as a washing place and as a trash can is written everywhere. What is said much less is that this behavior was not vandalism: it was the normal functioning of a public fountain in a market square, in the Rome of the early 1600s.

Campo de’ Fiori had hosted for centuries one of the city's main markets, and before that a thriving horse market held twice a week, on Monday and Saturday. The general fruit and vegetable market would settle into a stable form in the nineteenth century, but the commercial vocation of the square was centuries old. In a context like that, the only running water available to hundreds of people was the fountain's. Vendors washed their vegetables in it because they had no other way to wash them. Scraps ended up in the bowl because the square had no collection system. There was no intent to ruin anything: there was a city using its infrastructure for what it was for.

The 1622 conflict, read this way, changes nature. It isn't the conflict between those who respect art and those who mistreat it, but between two incompatible functions assigned to the same object: urban decorum on one side, a market's water service on the other. The authority chose decorum and closed the basin. The square answered with the nickname. And the fact that the nickname has survived four centuries while the hygiene question was filed away long ago suggests that, in the long run, the square won.

There's a corollary that holds for all of Rome and that is rarely stated. The historic fountains of the center were not ornaments: they were water distribution points, often the only one for an entire block. The Trevi Fountain was the terminal display of the Acqua Vergine, the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola that of the Traiano-Paolo aqueduct. The monumentality served to celebrate the pope who had brought the water back, but the function was prosaic and daily: filling buckets, watering animals, washing. Looking at these fountains as sculptures is a recent habit, born when the tap at home made them superfluous.

One last detail about the hole. When the lid was lowered, so as not to turn the fountain into an inert block, an opening was made at one end from which the water flows out. It's a small opening, almost unassuming, and it produces a modest stream that trickles more than it spurts. Anyone expecting the roar of monumental fountains is disappointed. Anyone who passes at dawn, with the corso still empty, hears a thin sound of water that carries very well in the silence, and understands that the monument has a voice, only a very low one.

The Right Photo to Take at the Corso Vittorio Tureen - Fontana della Terrina

The obvious photograph, the one everybody takes, is the head-on shot from sidewalk level with the monument in the center. It gives you a gray bowl in a gray basin, in front of a backdrop of traffic. It's correct and it's useless.

The Composition That Works

Stand on the side of the fountain facing south, with the Chiesa Nuova behind you, and frame it so the lid occupies the lower third of the frame while the bulk of the Palazzo della Cancelleria on the other side of the corso enters the upper third. You get an image that tells everything at once: a small, popular, almost domestic object set against one of the most aristocratic architectures of the Roman Renaissance. The distance between the two things, in that frame, is the meaning of the whole story.

The Best Variation

Get down with the camera to the height of the parapet, rest your elbows on the stone and shoot almost flush with the edge, so the lid stands out against the facade of the Chiesa Nuova. The low point of view corrects the sunken position of the basin and gives back to the monument the monumentality that street level takes away. With a moderately wide-angle lens the result is surprising, because the travertine fills the frame and the facade crowns it.

The Light

The right light comes early in the morning, raking from the east, when it crosses the still-empty corso and lights up the travertine surface, bringing out the letters of the inscription. The second useful window is the half hour after sunset, with the artificial lighting on and the sky still blue: the lowered basin catches light from below and the monument gains a volume it doesn't have at noon. The middle hours, with the sun directly overhead, are the absolute worst.

The Detail Not to Forget

A close-up photograph of the inscription, legible. It's the shot that makes the difference between an archive of monuments and a story, because it contains the date, it contains the Romanesco and it contains the phrase. Whoever goes home with that image has brought back something that can be told. Whoever goes home with the bowl seen from afar has brought back a bowl.

What to Avoid

Avoid including passing vehicles, which date the photograph and dirty it. Avoid the afternoon backlight from the north, which flattens the travertine into a uniform mass. And avoid, if possible, climbing on the parapet or resting equipment on the edge of the basin: the stone is ancient, the monument is protected and the gesture is unpleasant to anyone passing by.

Some Important Events That Happened Here in History

The chronology of this monument is more eventful than that of many far more celebrated fountains, because it includes two moves, a 25-year stretch of oblivion and a remaking that changed its appearance.

1581-1595, the Construction

Giacomo della Porta builds the basin for the center of Campo de’ Fiori, as part of the public fountain program promoted by Gregory XIII Boncompagni. The pope dies in 1585, before completion. The date that recurs most often in summaries is 1590. The range given by the Sovraintendenza's sources is 1581-1595.

1622, the Lid

An author who remained anonymous makes and installs the dome-shaped travertine lid, with a central knob and an inscription at the base of the knob. The four bronze dolphins are removed on the same occasion and have never been found. It's the year the zuppiera is, in effect, born.

Mid-Nineteenth Century, the Square Changes

After 1858 Campo de’ Fiori is enlarged to the north with the demolition of the houses between Via dei Baullari and Vicolo del Gallo. In the new portion of the square the copy of the fountain is placed, moved from the center. It's the prelude that makes possible, 30 years later, the removal of the original without leaving the square without water.

June 9, 1889, Giordano Bruno

The monument to Giordano Bruno by Ettore Ferrari is inaugurated in the center of Campo de’ Fiori, at the exact spot where the philosopher had been burned alive in 1600 and where the fountain stood. The ceremony is a leading political episode in the conflict between the Italian State and the Church. The fountain is dismantled and carried away.

1889-1924, the Warehouse

25 years in the municipal depots. It's the most fragile phase of the object's history: dismantled, stacked, without a destination, in a city that in those same years was demolishing and rebuilding at a frenzied pace.

1924, the Return

The city administration repositions the fountain in Piazza della Chiesa Nuova, along Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, in front of the entrance of Santa Maria in Vallicella. To cope with the low water pressure available at that spot, the basin is set into a quadrangular recess lower than street level. It's the solution still seen today and it determines the current perception of the monument.

From 1924 to Today

For a century the fountain has held this position. It has lived through the regime, the war, the reconstruction and the transformation of the corso into a traffic artery, and it has become one of those objects Romans recognize without looking. Maintenance campaigns have followed one another with the regularity that applies to all the city's historic fountains, managed by the Sovraintendenza Capitolina.

Who Has Passed Through the Corso Vittorio Tureen - Fontana della Terrina

The question has to be asked in two stages, because the monument has had two lives in two different places, and the people who crossed paths with it belong to worlds very far apart.

In Its First Life, at Campo de’ Fiori

From about 1590 to 1889 the fountain stood in the center of one of Rome's busiest squares. Market vendors passed by it, horse dealers on trading days, pilgrims headed to St. Peter's along Via Papale. Passing by, inevitably, were the condemned: Campo de’ Fiori was for centuries a place of public executions, and on February 17, 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned there, at the spot where his statue stands today and where, a few meters away, della Porta's basin stood at the time. The fountain was already there. It's one of those cases where an inanimate object turns out to be a witness to something enormous without being aware of it, and it's worth saying without rhetoric: the stone was there.

Giacomo della Porta himself also passed by, the author of that basin, who worked in the area for a long time. And so did the cardinals of the Cancelleria, the bankers of Via dei Banchi, and the whole humble population of the Regola district, which took its household water from that fountain.

In Its Second Life, at the Chiesa Nuova

Since 1924 the fountain has stood in front of a church that has been for four and a half centuries the center of Roman Oratorian spirituality, and still is. Here the Filippini community carries on its activity, and the adjoining complex of Borromini's Oratory has long hosted city cultural institutions, among them the Biblioteca Vallicelliana, one of the most important historic book collections in Rome.

The list of illustrious presences, for the square as a whole, includes some very big names. Filippo Neri, who lived here and is buried here, and who is one of the most original figures of sixteenth-century Rome: a priest who made people laugh, organized walks and concerts instead of threatening sermons, and whom the Romans called the saint of joy. Pietro da Cortona, who worked on the church's vault for almost 20 years. Rubens, who stayed in Rome in the early 1600s and for this altar painted on slate slabs, an unusual technical choice adopted to reduce reflections in the dimness of the presbytery. Francesco Borromini, who built the Oratory's concave facade a few meters away.

And Who Passes Today

Today tens of thousands of people pass every day, and the vast majority don't notice the fountain. Romans heading to work, students, groups in transit between Navona and the Vatican, morning runners. The zuppiera has become what fountains end up becoming when they survive long enough: furniture. Bringing it back to the condition of a monument takes only the decision to stop for 30 seconds, which nobody does because nobody has suggested it.

When to Come and When to Avoid

The Hours

The early morning hours remain the best choice for any visit at this spot. Traffic on Corso Vittorio starts early but is manageable until 8:30, the bar on the square works for the residents and the light is right. The second window is the evening, after 9, when the flow thins out and the artificial lighting completely transforms the perception of the lowered basin.

The hours to avoid are those between 8:30 and 10:30 in the morning and between 5:00 and 7:30 in the afternoon, when the corso is running at full capacity and the square simply becomes the edge of a busy road.

The Seasons

April, May, October and the first two weeks of November are the periods when this whole part of the center is at its best: reasonable temperatures, long light, bearable crowds. July and August, in the middle hours, are hard: the square has little shade, the travertine reflects and the corso radiates heat. Anyone coming in summer should come at dawn or after dinner, and in this second case will also find the area between Navona and Governo Vecchio at its liveliest.

Winter has an advantage few consider: with an overcast sky and wet paving the travertine changes color, becomes darker and more legible, and the fountain looks better photographically than on a clear July day.

Dates to Know

May 26 is the feast of Saint Philip Neri, and the Chiesa Nuova has its most intense day of the year, with services and attendance notably above normal. Anyone looking for quiet should change the date. Anyone who wants to see the complex at its liveliest should choose exactly that one. On February 17, the anniversary of Giordano Bruno's burning, a secular commemoration is held every year at Campo de’ Fiori. It's useful to know for anyone building an itinerary linking the two places, since the fountain's story passes through there.

What's Around, Within 10 Minutes on Foot

This is perhaps the part of Rome with the greatest density of notable things per square meter, and the fountain is a good geometric center for it.

Toward the North and East

Five minutes away is Piazza Navona, with Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in the center and della Porta's two side fountains at the ends, which lead back to the sixteenth-century program the zuppiera also comes from. Beneath the square are the underground remains of the Stadium of Domitian, which explain why the square has that elongated shape with curved ends. A little farther on, Palazzo Altemps houses one of the sites of the Museo Nazionale Romano. Continuing east you reach the Pantheon, the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the Church of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, with Borromini's spiral lantern that remains one of the boldest architectural objects in the city.

Toward the South

The Palazzo della Cancelleria is on the other side of the corso, and just beyond is Campo de’ Fiori with the monument to Giordano Bruno and the copy of the fountain. From there you reach in two minutes the Galleria Spada, which besides its picture gallery holds Borromini's famous forced-perspective gallery, and a little farther Via Giulia with the Church of Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte, which is worth a stop for reasons completely different from all the rest of the neighborhood.

Toward the East, Along the Corso

The Basilica of Sant’Andrea della Valle has the second tallest dome in Rome and an interior that deserves much more than the five minutes it's usually given. The Museo di Roma at Palazzo Braschi tells precisely the story of the urban transformations of which this fountain is both victim and witness. Farther on, Largo Torre Argentina with the Sacred Area and the cat sanctuary.

Toward the River

10 minutes west brings you to the Tiber and Castel Sant’Angelo. A detour south along the lungotevere leads to Tiber Island and the Ponte Rotto, and from there to the Mouth of Truth. In the opposite direction, heading up toward the modern center, you arrive at Via del Corso.

Quick Questions About the Fontana della Terrina

Why is it called the zuppiera?

For the shape it took after 1622, when a large dome-shaped travertine lid with a central knob was lowered onto the basin. The nickname was born as a protest and took hold in the following decades.

Who built it?

The basin is the work of Giacomo della Porta, built within the span 1581-1595, with 1590 as the most frequently cited date. The author of the 1622 lid remains unknown.

Who commissioned it?

Pope Gregory XIII Boncompagni, as part of the public fountains program of the late sixteenth century. The pontiff died in 1585, before the work was completed.

What does the inscription say?

AMA DIO E NON FALLIRE. FA DEL BENE E LASSA DIRE. MDCXXII. It is at the base of the central knob of the lid, and the form lassa is the Romanesco variant of lascia.

Is it the same fountain you see in Campo de' Fiori?

No. The one in Campo de' Fiori is a copy, moved to the northern part of the square after the enlargement of 1858. The original was removed in 1889 and has been in Piazza della Chiesa Nuova since 1924.

Why was it moved?

To make room for the monument to Giordano Bruno by Ettore Ferrari, inaugurated on June 9, 1889 in the center of Campo de' Fiori.

Where did it stay between 1889 and 1924?

In the municipal storerooms, dismantled, for about 25 years, until the Capitoline decision to put it back.

Why is the basin lower than the street?

Because of the limited water pressure available at the 1924 relocation site. Lowering the level of the basin produced a working outflow, at the price of making the monument almost invisible from Corso Vittorio.

What happened to the bronze dolphins?

There were four. They had been cast for the fountain in Piazza Mattei and never mounted there, were reused on this basin and were removed in 1622 with the installation of the lid. They are recorded as lost.

Does it come from Campo Vaccino?

No. The documented provenance is Campo de' Fiori. The confusion with Campo Vaccino, the historical name of the Roman Forum, arises from the assonance of the two place names.

Can you drink the water?

This is not a drinking fountain of the nasone type and it is not designed for direct use. If you are looking for drinking water, you'll find many public fountains within a radius of a few hundred meters, along Via del Governo Vecchio and around Piazza Navona.

How much time do you need to see it?

From 10 to 20 minutes, as part of a broader route. It can't carry a standalone visit and doesn't need one.

Is it accessible?

The square is flat and the monument is viewed from the parapet with no steps to negotiate. The main issue is crossing Corso Vittorio, which has to be done on the crosswalk with a traffic light.

Can you also visit the Chiesa Nuova?

Yes, entry to the church is free during worship opening hours, and it's worth the visit for the vault by Pietro da Cortona and for the three panels on slate by Rubens on the high altar.

In our judgment the Zuppiera is one of the most underrated monuments in the center of Rome, and for a precise reason: it has nothing to show and everything to tell. A basin by Giacomo della Porta, an anonymous lid that the Romans took as an affront and turned into a name, a proverb in Romanesco carved in travertine, a forced move to make room for a martyr of free thought, 25 years of oblivion in a storeroom and a return to a square that in the sixteenth century did not exist. In a few cubic meters of stone you find the Renaissance, popular satire, the conflict between State and Church and the urban demolitions of unified Italy. Whoever passes and doesn't stop hasn't lost a fountain: they have lost four centuries of city.

Frequently asked questions about the Zuppiera di Corso Vittorio, Fontana della Terrina

Where is the Zuppiera di Corso Vittorio?

The Zuppiera di Corso Vittorio is in Rome, in the Parione district, in Piazza della Chiesa Nuova, along the northern side of Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, practically opposite the entrance of the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, known, indeed, as Chiesa Nuova. On the opposite side of the Corso rises the Palazzo della Cancelleria.

Why is the fountain called Zuppiera?

The Zuppiera di Corso Vittorio takes its nickname from the rounded, flattened shape it took on after 1622, when a large domed travertine lid with a central knob was lowered onto the sixteenth-century basin. The name was born in a tone of protest and became established only in the decades after 1622.

Who built the Zuppiera di Corso Vittorio?

The basin of the Zuppiera di Corso Vittorio is the work of Giacomo della Porta, an architect active between the mature Renaissance and the early Baroque, built in the span 1581-1595, with 1590 as the most frequently cited date. The domed lid that gave it its nickname is instead a later intervention, of 1622.

Is the Zuppiera di Corso Vittorio the same fountain you see today in Campo de' Fiori?

No, the fountain you see today in Campo de' Fiori is not the Zuppiera di Corso Vittorio, even though the two have a similar shape and this often generates confusion. In 1889 della Porta's original basin was removed from the center of Campo de' Fiori to make room for the monument to Giordano Bruno, and the current fountain in that square is a different reconstruction.

What does the inscription on the fountain say?

On the collar at the base of the central knob of the Zuppiera di Corso Vittorio runs the inscription, in capitals: AMA DIO E NON FALLIRE. FA DEL BENE E LASSA DIRE. MDCXXII. The form lassa is the Romanesco variant of the verb lasciare, not a transcription error.

Is it worth making a special stop to see the fountain?

It's not worth coming to Piazza della Chiesa Nuova just to see the Corso Vittorio Tureen, because on its own it's exhausted in a few minutes of observation. It pays off much more if inserted in the middle of a walk through Rome's historic center, among Parione, Campo de’ Fiori and Piazza Navona.

What is near the Corso Vittorio Tureen?

Five minutes on foot from the Corso Vittorio Tureen is Piazza Navona, with Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in the center and the two side fountains made by della Porta, which belong to the same sixteenth-century program of public fountains the zuppiera also comes from.

Article written by the TourLeaderPro editorial team, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences. For a guided walk among Parione, Regola and Giacomo della Porta's fountains, with a licensed tour leader, start from the TourLeaderPro contact page. Agencies and tour operators building itineraries in the historic center of Rome will find the consulting service in the section dedicated to tour operators.

Planning a trip to Rome? The English-language guides to visiting the city are on ItalyPlanner.com, where you'll find walking itineraries for the historic center and practical explanations of how hours, tickets and limited traffic zones really work. For anyone who wants to understand how many days to devote to the city before booking, the starting point is the guide on how many days you need in Rome.