Fountains of Papal Rome/La Barcaccia
AT the foot of the great stone stairway, known in Italian as La Scalinata and in English as the Spanish Steps, which leads down from the Church of the Trinita de' Monti, to the Piazza di Spagna lies the singular fountain called La Barcaccia. The design of this fountain is that of a quaintly conventionalized boat, fast sinking under the water which is pouring into it. To this effect it owes its name; for "barca," being the Italian for boat, and "accia" a termination of opprobrium, Barcaccia means a worthless boat. The boat is supposed to commemorate an event which occurred during the great flood of i5g8. On Christmas Day of that year the Tiber rose to its highest recorded level. All this part of the city was submerged to a depth of from seventeen to twenty-five feet; and here in the Piazza di Spagna a boat drifted ashore, grounding on that slope of the Pincian Hill, which is now covered by the Spanish Steps. For a long time the design of this fountain was supposed to commemorate this event, and it is quite possible that this may have been the case. Still there are other fountains of this design, the work of Carlo Maderno, and as one is in the Villa d'Este at Tivoli and the other in the Villa Aldobrandini, it is also quite possible that Carlo Maderno and the creator of the Barcaccia may have had yet another idea when they constructed their stone boats with a fountain amidships and lying in basins not much larger than the boats themselves. For the Romans of this time knew much and surmised still more about the mysterious boats lying at the bottom of Lake Nemi, in the Alban Hills, not more than seventeen miles distant from Rome. These boats had been discovered first during the pontificate of Pope Eugenius IV, and had been rediscovered in Paul IIFs time, in i535, or about a hundred years before Carlo Maderno employed this design for a fountain. At each date an attempt had been made to raise the boats, but these efforts as well as all subsequent attempts proved unsuccessful. However, in i535 measurements had been computed and many objects belonging to the vessels had been brought to the surface to excite the wonder and admiration of the Roman world. It was discovered that the boats when once raised and floated would all but fill the tiny lake. The decks had been made of concrete and marble, and amidships there had been fountains whose falling waters mingled with those of the lake. The mystery surrounding the purpose and construction of those huge vessels is yet unsolved, but in the seventeenth century it still stirred men's imaginations with all the force of fresh discovery. Both Maderno and Pietro Bernini could not have been ignorant of it, and they must have seen the exquisite bronzes and lead pipes bearing the stamp of the Emperor Tiberius which had been detached and brought up from the sunken vessels. The Barcaccia fountain is the last work of Pietro Bernini, the father of Lorenzo. He had been employed to bring a branch of the Trevi Water from its reservoir at the head of the Vicolo del Bottino as far as the foot of the Pincian Hill in front of the Trinita de' Monti, and the fountain done by order of Pope Urban VIII (1628-1644) was the adequate consummation of that work. From whatever cause he derived his inspiration, his design of the Barcaccia fountain is so admirably suited to its position that it explains and almost excuses the popular idea that the fountain was made low in order not to obscure the view of the Spanish Steps. A reference to dates at once shows the absurdity of this last suggestion. In the Keats Memorial House hard by there can be seen an engraving by Falda (born in i64o) showing Pietro Bernini's completed fountain against the background of the tree-planted slope of the Pincian HilL The fountain was finished before the death of Pope Urban VIII, which occurred in i644, and the steps were not begun until 1721, nine pontificates after that of Urban VIII.
On the prow and stern of the boat is carved the coat of arms of the Barberini family, for Urban VIII was the Barberini Pope and the founder of that family in Rome. This pontiff, whose character was a formidable compound of priest, statesman, warrior, and man of letters, delighted in the design of the fountain. Pietro Bernini had placed cannon at either end, thus making his boat into a war-vessel, whereupon Urban VIII composed a Latin distich in its praise:
"Bellica pontificum non fundit machina flammas,
Sed dulcem, belli qua perit ignis, aquam."
“The war-ship of the priest, instead of flames,
Pours water, and the fire of battle tames."
At both ends of the large basin in which the boat stands are long, flat pieces of travertine. These are the stepping-stones on which any one using the fountain stands while dipping up the water. The Marcia Pia now supplies the houses in this part of the city, but the Romans still prefer to drink Trevi, and the steppingstones are as much in use as they were in the days when Falda and other artists of that period engraved this fountain, placing in the lower basin figures of men or women in the act of dipping up the water. This quarter of Rome, once a part of the Campus Martius of classical days, has been for a long time given over to the interests of the American and English colonies; but for more than three centuries its foreign associations were chiefly French. Urban VIII was in many ways a French Pope, although he came of a Florentine family. As papal nuncio he had spent many years and made many powerful friends at the courts of Henry IV and Louis XIIL In the conclave which elected him Pope, France openly and ardently supported his claims. During his residence in France he had known Armand du Plessis, who was to become Cardinal Richelieu. The two great churchmen went up the ladder of preferment side by side. They became, as pope and cardinal minister, respectively, lifelong allies in their tireless and successful efforts to humble the dual power of Austria and Spain, while promoting on the one hand the prestige of France and on the other the stability of the Papal See.
At the accession of Urban VIII, Spain and Austria held the passes of the Alps, thus dominating Europe and threatening the existence of the Papal States. At the close of his pontificate, France was rapidly becoming the first Continental power, and the Papal States had reached their utmost limit of territorial expansion. With his death the French influence in papal politics rapidly declined, but its artistic ascendency still lingered on. Thirteen years later a certain French gentleman, attached to the French embassy at Rome, and named Etienne de GuQEesr, left in his will a sum of money for the construction of a great stone stairway which should connect the Piazza of the Trinita de' Monti, in the centre of which lay the Barcaccia fountain, with the Church of the Trinita de' Monti, standing far above, on the slope of the Kncian Hill. This gentleman, of whom little is known, must have been the friend of more than one of the great French artists who were living in Rome contemporaneously with himself. Possibly the splendid project of the Scalinata was the result of long hours of comradeship, when he, with his fellow countrymen, watched the sunset from the terrace which Sixtus V had placed before the Church on the Hill, or scrambled down the tree-planted slope before it in order to reach the fountain at its base. Certain it is that Rome owes this most distinctive architectural feature of papal times to the imagination and generosity of a Frenchman. The two Latin inscriptions upon the steps are worthy of attention.[1]
The building of the steps, begun by Alessandro Specchi and completed by Francesco de Sanctis, was not undertaken, as appears from the inscription, till sixty years after the death of De Gu6ffier and six pontificates later than that of Alexander VII (Chigi), in which De GuSffier died. By that time the Spanish influence had reasserted itself to a marked degree, and as the Spanish embassy had been established in a palace on the western side of the square, the old name of the Piazza della Trinita de' Monti gradually gave way to the present name, Piazza di Spagna. And so finally the great stone stairway, the gift of a Frenchman in the heyday of French influence at Rome, came to be known as the Spanish Steps.
Yet, after all, the paramount association with the fountain of the Barcaccia is neither French nor Spanish, but belongs pre-eminently to the English-speaking race. This fantastic fountain, with its commonplace background and its limited view of the Scalinata, forms the only outlook from the windows of the house in which the poet Keats spent the last three months of his life; so that from the position of this house the fountain of the Barcaccia is connected for all time with the fate of the "young English poet" who lies buried now these many years in the Protestant cemetery outside the walls. From the windows of his narrow deathchamber he watched the plashing waters in the fountain below him, while above his head the bells in the church, which he could not see, remorselessly rang out the quarter-hours or tolled for some fellow creature the "agonia," or "passing bell." During his hours of listlessness or fits of sombre rage, this passing of time and of life was always in his ears, as the futile play of the water was always before his eyes.
It is not difficult to connect the bells and the fountain with the bitter epitaph written, by his own wish, above his grave:
"Here lies one whose name was writ in water”
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑ See Appendix.