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The Piazza della Rotonda is a piazza (city square) in Rome, Italy. It gets its name from the Pantheon, informally called rotonda in Italian, which stands on its south side.

History

Although the Pantheon stood from antiquity, the Piazza della Rotonda was first excavated and paved by Pope Eugenius IV (1431-39). The piazza is roughly rectangular, approximately 60 meters north to south and 40 meters east to west, with a fountain and obelisk in the center and the the ancient Pantheon on the south side.

During the nineteenth century, the piazza was especially noted for its market of bird-sellers, who brought their cages with live parrots, nightingales, owls, and other birds into the piazza. A traveler in 1819 remarked that during Twelfth Night celebrations in Rome the Piazza della Rotonda was "in particular distinguished by the gay appearance of the fruit and cake-stalls, dressed with flowers and lighted with paper lanterns." An 1879 Baedeker guidebook noted that the "busy scene" of the piazza "affords the stranger opportunities of observing the characteristics of the peasantry."

The fountain and obelisk

In the center of the piazza is a fountain, surmounted by a Egyptian obelisk. The fountain was constructed under Pope Gregory XIII in 1575, and the obelisk was added to it

The Aqua Virgo, one of the eleven aqueducts that supplied ancient Rome with drinking water, served the area of the Campus Martius, but had fallen into disrepair and disuse by the late Middle Ages. It was reconstructed under Pope Nicholas V and consecrated in 1453 as the Acqua Vergine. In 1570, Giacomo della Porta was commissioned under Pope Gregory XIII to oversee a major project to extend the distribution of water from the Vergine to eighteen new public fountains. Construction of the fountain in the Piazza della Rotonda was authorized on September 25, together with a fountain for Piazza Colonna, and two more for Piazza Navona; the fountain for the Rotonda, completed in 1575, was of a chalice-type design, around 3.5 to 4 meters in height, and fed with the Vergine water through a terra-cotta conduit. Della Porta designed the fountain, and Leonardo Sormani executed it. Due to the slope of the piazza, the fountain is approached by five steps on the south side, and only two on the north.

In 1711 the fountain was given its current appearance when Pope Clement XI had the Late Baroque sculptor Filippo Barigioni top it with a 20-foot red marble Egyptian obelisk. The obelisk, originally constructed by Pharaoh Ramses II for the Temple of Ra in Heliopolis, had been brought to Rome in ancient times. It was rediscovered in 1374 underneath the apse of the nearby Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. In the mid-1400s the obelisk had been erected in the small Piazza di San Macuto some 200 meters east of the Pantheon, where it remained until its 1711 move to the Piazza della Rotonda. It is still called the Macuteo obelisk after its previous location.

References

1. Vasari, Giorgio (1907 (tr.)). Vasari on Technique. London: J.M. Dent & Co. p. 28 n.7. Retrieved May 6, 2011. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: year (link); Lanciani, Rodolfo (1899). The Destruction of Ancient Rome. London: MacMillan. p. 112. Retrieved May 6, 2011. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
2. Story, William Wetmore (1887). Roba di Roma. Vol. II. Cambridge: Houghton, Mifflin. p. 392. Retrieved May 7, 2011.
3. Graham, Maria (1820). Three Months Passed in the Mountains East of Rome. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown. p. 276 n. Retrieved May 7, 2011. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
4. Baedeker, Karl (1879). Italy: Handbook for Travelers: Second part, Central Italy and Rome. Leipzig. p. 185. Retrieved May 7, 2011. {{cite book}}: Check |authorlink= value (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
5. Katherine Wentworth Rinne, Fluid Precision: Giacomo della Porta and the Acqua Vergine Fountains of Rome, pp. 185-88, in Jan Birksted, ed. (2000). Landscapes of Memory and Experience. London: Spon Press. Retrieved May 6, 2011.
6. Id.
7. Pulvers, Marvin (2002). Roman Fountains. Rome: L'Erma di Bretschneider. p. 630. Retrieved May 6, 2011. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
8. Id. at 631.
9. Lanciani, Rodolfo (1897). The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin. p. 500. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); Eaton, Charlotte A. (1860). Rome in the Nineteenth Century. Vol. 1. London: Henry G. Bohn. p. 354. Retrieved May 6, 2011.
10. Palladio, Andrea (2006). Palladio's Rome. Translated by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks. p. 216 n.219. Retrieved May 6, 2011.

See also

• List of fountains in Rome
• List of obelisks in Rome