Piazza Barberini & the Triton Fountain
Why is it significant?
In the middle of the roaring traffic circle, find the sea god kneeling on a giant open scallop shell, his head thrown back, blowing a jet of water high into the air through a conch. Four dolphins hold up the shell with their tails. Look between them, and you will spot three large bees.
Key Facts
| Place | Piazza Barberini & the Triton Fountain |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza Barberini, 00187 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.90370, 12.48850 |
| Part of Walk | Rivals on the Quirinal: Bernini vs Borromini in Baroque Rome |
| Generated | Generated |
In the middle of the roaring traffic circle, find the sea god kneeling on a giant open scallop shell, his head thrown back, blowing a jet of water high into the air through a conch. Four dolphins hold up the shell with their tails. Look between them, and you will spot three large bees.
The bees are the coat of arms of the Barberini, a Florentine family who struck gold in 1623, when Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban the Eighth. He reigned for twenty-one years, and he stamped his bees on half of Rome. His favourite artist was a young man he had known since boyhood, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and in 1642 and 1643 Bernini made this fountain for the square outside the family palace.
It was something new. Until then, Roman fountains were basins and architecture. Bernini made a fountain that was pure sculpture, a living moment, as if the Triton had just broken through the surface of the sea. Travertine, not marble, and yet it moves. Every later fountain in Rome owes something to this one.
Now walk to the corner where Via Veneto begins, and find the little shell-shaped basin on the wall with three bees drinking from it. This is Bernini's Fountain of the Bees, from 1644. The story goes that its inscription proudly announced the twenty-second year of Urban's reign, when the twenty-first was not quite over. Romans muttered that it was tempting fate. The numeral was hastily scraped away... and the pope died a few days before the anniversary anyway. The little fountain was dismantled in the nineteenth century and only rebuilt here, partly with new stone, in 1915.
Not everyone loved the Barberini. Urban stripped ancient bronze from the portico of the Pantheon, and Romans coined the joke that still sticks: what the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did. Now walk a few steps up Via Veneto, to the church at the top of a double staircase. Its cellar is decorated in a way you will not forget.