A Natural Stage Set
Piazza Navona is a stage set. Its shape, the proportions of the façades, the succession of three fountains, the light that changes from morning to evening — everything contributes to creating a theatrical space that filmmakers and writers have systematically exploited to evoke Rome.
This is not a recent choice: the vedutisti of the eighteenth century were already painting it as an ideal backdrop; nineteenth-century novelists already cited it as a cardinal point of the city. The twentieth century added cinema, and the cycle was complete: today the square is inseparable from the images that have been constructed of it.
Literature: The Founders of the Imagination
Goethe was the first great literary witness of modern Rome. In his Italian Journey (1816–1817), Rome is not a backdrop but a protagonist, and Piazza Navona — with its teeming life, the market, the voices — embodies the popular vitality the poet sought as an antidote to cold northern rationalism.
Charles Dickens, in 1845, left the most vivid pages of the genre in Pictures from Italy. His description of the Carnival at Piazza Navona — the confetti, the moccolo, the masked crowd — is a primary literary document as well as a tool for historical understanding of a now-vanished tradition.
Nathaniel Hawthorne set his novel The Marble Faun (1860) in Rome. The novel — considered the first American novel set in Europe — uses the city as a moral stage, and Piazza Navona appears as a place of the past and of loss.
Among Italian writers, Alberto Moravia and Giorgio Bassani have given back an image of twentieth-century bourgeois and intellectual Rome in which the square appears as both geographical and symbolic coordinate.
Italian Cinema: Rome on Stage
Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953), with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, is the film that more than any other fixed in the global imagination the image of Rome as a city of love and chance. Piazza Navona appears in the film as a backdrop to Roman daily life, one of the coordinates of the protagonists' walk through the historic centre.
Federico Fellini never filmed explicitly fictional scenes set at Piazza Navona, but the square features in documentaries and footage of Roman life that fed his vision of Rome as a city of excess and permanent carnival.
The Italian genre crime films of the 1960s and 1970s — the so-called poliziottesco — repeatedly used the streets around the square for chases and night scenes, exploiting the contrast between Baroque grandeur and the urban decay of the period.
International Cinema
Angels & Demons (Ron Howard, 2009), based on Dan Brown's novel, uses Piazza Navona as the central scene of one of the film's most spectacular sequences. The protagonist Robert Langdon must solve a puzzle set at the Fountain of the Four Rivers, whose obelisk is interpreted (incorrectly, in the film) as one of the Illuminati sect's signals. Despite the historical inaccuracies, the film generated significant tourist interest in the square.
To Rome with Love (Woody Allen, 2012) uses Rome — Piazza Navona included — as the backdrop for a series of parallel stories playing on the American perception of the city as a place of romance and strangeness. The square appears as the quintessence of tourist Italianness, viewed with Allen's characteristic affectionate irony.
The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999), filmed partly in Rome and southern Italy, evokes a 1950s Italy in which the square appears as a meeting place and site of social ambiguity.
Contemporary Literature
In contemporary fiction in English and Italian, Piazza Navona appears frequently as a geographical meridian of Rome: it is the place where characters meet, lose sight of each other, encounter each other by chance. In novels by writers who use Rome as a setting, the square functions as an identity marker: those who go to Piazza Navona are tourists or old Romans; those who avoid the square are true Romans.
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Frequently Asked Questions
In which film does Piazza Navona appear most explicitly? Angels & Demons (2009) with Tom Hanks is the film that uses it most explicitly and spectacularly, though with numerous historical liberties.
Did Dickens really describe Piazza Navona? Yes. In Pictures from Italy (1846) he describes the Roman Carnival set on the square, with vivid details of the moccolo and the crowd.
Is Hawthorne's novel set in Rome? Yes. The Marble Faun (1860) is one of the first great American novels set in Europe, with Rome as the main setting.
Article no. 159 — TIER S — MON-08 Piazza Navona Type: HISTORICAL Words: ~800