Rome, Piazza Navona - 12

by AM FineArtPrints

Title

Rome, Piazza Navona - 12

Artist

AM FineArtPrints

Medium

Painting - Painting

Description

Rome, Piazza Navona - 12

A detailed view of Piazza Navona, one of the many jewels of the city of Rome, the Eternal City. It is a square that you can not help but visit, one of the most enchanting and intimate places in the city center, surrounded by buildings that tell each a large part of history. Piazza Navona, at the time of ancient Rome, was the Stadium of Domitian which was built by Emperor Domitian in the 85th and in the 3rd century it was restored by Alexander Severus. It was 276 meters long, 106 wide and could accommodate 30,000 spectators.
The stadium was richly decorated with some statues, one of which is that of Pasquino (perhaps a copy of a Hellenistic parchment group supposedly representing Menelaus supporting the body of Patroclus), now in the homonymous square next to Piazza Navona.
Since it was a stadium and not a circus, there were no carceres (the gates from which racehorses came out) nor the thorn (the dividing wall around which the horses ran) such as the Circus Maximus, but it was all free and used for athletes competitions. The obelisk that is now in the center of the square was not there, but comes from the Circus Massenzio, which is still on the Appian Way.
The name of the square was originally "in Agone" (from the Latin in agonis, "games") because the stadium was used exclusively for athletic competitions. Formerly the square was concave, the closures of the three fountains were blocked and the water came out so as to flood the square.
Between the X and XI centuries the Campus Agonis with its Cryptas were wholly owned by the Abbey of Farfa, to pass in the XIII century entirely under the control of the Roman magistrate to be periodically used for play, use that will last until the advanced Renaissance when it still appears as an area used for chivalric training and carnival performances. In this short interval the ownership of the Circus Agonis is split between private owners and ecclesiastical bodies.
That the square "in Nagoni" had returned to be used for recreational purposes has already been witnessed in the second half of the fifteenth century, during the papacy of Paul II during the Carnival and in 1476, on the occasion of a carousel organized by the family of Pope Sixtus IV on the day of San Marco.
Between 1810 and 1839, the jockey races were held in the square, ie mounted horse races (which, however, had no kinship with the most famous barges races in Via del Corso).

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January 7th, 2022

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