The nymphs Rome tried not to look at

Rome built a screen to hide its own fountain

Crowds packed Piazza della Repubblica, Rome to see four bronze women locked in combat with animals, and to complain about it. Each nymph straddled a creature at the rim of the fountain in front of you: a swan, a river serpent, a sea horse, a dragon. All four were naked. The sculptor was Mario Rutelli, a Sicilian brought in from Palermo to finish the square's centerpiece. He had replaced four plaster lions with something nobody in Rome had agreed to see.

Newspapers of the day mocked the piazza's old name, Piazza dell'Esedra, as a fitting home for a peep show. Officials built a timber screen around the basin to shield passersby, which only pulled bigger crowds who wanted a look through the gaps. The complaint was not really about swans or dragons. It was about bare bronze bodies on the biggest new stage in the capital of a newly unified, newly self-conscious Italy. Rutelli held his ground, and so did the fountain. It stayed. Decades later, his great-grandson Francesco Rutelli would become mayor of the same city.

Plaster lions once sat where the nymphs now wrestle

Thirty years before the nymphs, this same spot held something the city found much easier to accept. Pope Pope Pius IX ordered a fountain here in 1870 to mark the arrival of the Acqua Pia, a restored aqueduct feeding fresh water into the new part of Rome. It was finished in 1888 with four plaster lions, tame and forgettable, designed by Alessandro Guerrieri. Nobody wrote home about the lions. They sat there for over a decade, doing nothing to the city's pulse, while Piazza della Repubblica, Rome grew up around them under Gaetano Koch's new arcaded palazzi. The square Pius IX had blessed with plain water and stone animals was, within a generation, ready for something else entirely. Rutelli's nymphs went up in 1901 on the same base. The lions had asked nothing of anyone who walked past. The nymphs asked Rome to decide, right there in its grandest new piazza, exactly what it was willing to have standing in the open.

A Vestal was buried alive near this square

Rome had a harsher answer to the question the nymphs would later ask. A Vestal Virgin who broke her vow of chastity was not fined or exiled. She was carried, alive, to a chamber underground and sealed in with a lamp and a little bread. The place was called the Campus Sceleratus, the Field of Shame, just outside the old Porta Collina, roughly 400 meters southwest) of where the fountain stands now. No trial by jury, no public defense. The state decided what a woman's body could be allowed to have done, and buried the verdict with her. The exact women and dates are lost, but the practice is documented in Roman sources tied to this ground. Centuries later, a crowd would gather at the same square to argue about bronze women wrestling swans. Nobody was buried alive over the nymphs. But the impulse behind both moments was the same: a city deciding, in public, what it would tolerate being shown or done in view of everyone else. The Vestals paid for the decision with their lives. Rutelli paid for his with newspaper column inches.

A bathhouse of naked bodies became a church

The ground under the fountain has already changed its mind once about bare bodies. The Baths of Diocletian rose here between 298 and 306 AD, the largest public baths ancient Rome ever built, 190 meters northeast of the piazza. Thousands of Romans bathed there daily, naked, without scandal — bodies on public display were simply how the empire washed. The baths served the crowded hills around them until 537 AD, when Gothic forces cut the aqueducts during the siege of Rome and the water stopped for good. The ruins sat scavenged and half-collapsed for a thousand years. Then, in the 16th century, Michelangelo was brought in to convert part of the wrecked frigidarium and tepidarium into a church.

The result, Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, stands where Romans once bathed in the open. The same stone that held naked bodies without comment now held a basilica built to discourage exactly that. When Rutelli's nymphs went up three centuries later, a few hundred meters away, Rome was fighting the same argument again, just with bronze instead of flesh.

Water forced the naked nymphs to close, not modesty

More than a century after the nymphs went up, the fountain closed again — not over modesty, but over water. In August 2018, officials shut the Fontana delle Naiadi, including the Ninfa dei Laghi figure standing ten meters from where you stand, after infiltration threatened the Metro A station running directly underneath the piazza. The same water that once scandalized Rome by dressing four bronze women in nothing had started seeping into the tunnels below them. Engineers, not bishops or newspaper editors, decided this time what the square could show and what had to be covered up and repaired first. The fountain came back. It always does.

A general's tomb replaced the baths' naked stone

Just short of the fountain, inside the basilica built from the old baths, Rome buried a very different kind of body. Armando Diaz, the Italian general who commanded the decisive victory at Vittorio Veneto in 1918 that ended Italy's fight in the First World War, is entombed in Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, 138 meters from the fountain. He died in 1928, a national hero, and the church that had once covered up a bathhouse's naked stonework now put his memory openly on display instead — a body the state very much wanted seen and honored. Popes, cardinals, and painters lie in the same basilica, all decided worthy of public commemoration inside walls that once hid an empire's washroom.