Bernini's Elephant & Galileo at the Minerva

Why is it significant?

Say hello to the most charming animal in Rome: a small marble elephant in a long saddle cloth, trunk curled back, carrying an Egyptian obelisk and watching you with a faintly mischievous eye. Romans nicknamed it the Pulcino della Minerva, the little chick of the Minerva.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Say hello to the most charming animal in Rome: a small marble elephant in a long saddle cloth, trunk curled back, carrying an Egyptian obelisk and watching you with a faintly mischievous eye. Romans nicknamed it the Pulcino della Minerva, the little chick of the Minerva.

The obelisk is far older than its elephant. It was carved in Egypt for the pharaoh Apries in the 6th century BC and brought to Rome for the great sanctuary of Isis that once filled this neighbourhood. Here is the paradox: Augustus built his legend on defeating Cleopatra and Egypt, yet Egypt's gods conquered his Campus Martius anyway, with a temple full of obelisks, sphinxes and statues. Dominican friars dug this one up in their convent garden in 1665.

Pope Alexander the Seventh asked Bernini to raise it, and Bernini designed the elephant, carved by his assistant Ercole Ferrata and unveiled in 1667. The story goes that a Dominican friar insisted no elephant could carry such a load on an empty belly, so a block of stone was put underneath, hidden by that oversized saddle cloth. Bernini, the legend says, took his revenge: walk around and see where the elephant's backside points... toward the friars' convent.

That convent holds a darker memory. On 22 June 1633, in a hall of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Galileo Galilei, sixty-nine years old, knelt before the cardinals of the Inquisition and abjured the idea that the Earth moves around the Sun. The famous muttered reply, and yet it moves, is almost certainly a later legend. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

The church's name is a little archaeological joke: Santa Maria sopra Minerva means Saint Mary above Minerva, because medieval Romans believed it stood on a temple of the goddess. It is Rome's great Gothic church, with Michelangelo's Risen Christ inside and the body of Saint Catherine of Siena under the high altar. Beneath it all lie the foundations of older gods. Now walk east into Via del Piè di Marmo, the street of the marble foot, glance at the giant sandalled foot on its corner, and then turn north toward a row of colossal columns.