What lies underneath Piazza Navona
Travel Tips for: Area: Piazza Navona | Topic: Rome History
Written By: Holiday Velvet
The beautiful Piazza Navona, with its fountains by Bernini, takes its oval shape for a very good reason: underneath it lies the remains of the Stadium of Domitian. The buildings that line the piazza are build over the Stadium’s original seating arrangements. Wandering this peaceful piazza it is hard to imagine that 2000 years ago a crowd of 30,000 Romans were here, cheering loudly at extremely cruel “games”.
The Stadium was built in 86BC by emperor Domitian and some of its remnants can be admired north of the square. Also known as the Circus Agonalis (Agone being the origin “agony” ) over time the name changed to ‘in agone’ to ‘navone’ and eventually to ‘navona’. The obelisk that is now part of the quattro fiumi fountain, has always been here (although it broke into 5 pieces during the 6th Century and was repaired)- it is called the obelisk of Domitian and has hieroglyphs related to the cult of Egyptian gods Isis and Serapis.
Holiday Velvet offers unique Rome vacation rentals and Navona holiday apartments
August 3rd, 2009 at 7:34 pm
[...] by the baroque Church of Sant’Agnese. The piazza was once a Roman sporting stadium called Circus Agonalis and bits of the original stadium which was paved over in the fifteenth century can still be [...]