There is a precise moment when the Fountain of the Four Rivers stops being a postcard and turns into a machine you want to study: when you notice that the rock under the obelisk is pierced right through, and that a block of granite more than sixteen metres tall is resting on a void.
The effect is deliberate. To Bernini’s contemporaries that hollowed-out crag looked about to give way, and crossing the square meant walking around the fountain to work out how the weight was being carried.
I have been walking through Piazza Navona for years, and the fountain still plays the same trick on me. From a distance it is a monument; move three metres closer and it becomes a story with four characters, a lion, a horse, a dragon and an armadillo. Nobody stops long enough at any of them.
This is the story of how it came about, of who the four statues are, and of a beautiful legend that the dates demolish in a second.
Let us start with how Bernini got the job, because he was not supposed to have it.
The competition Bernini was not meant to win
In 1644 Urban VIII Barberini died, the pope who had made Bernini the artist of Rome. Innocent X Pamphilj took the throne, and the worst stretch of the sculptor’s career began: the new family preferred other men, and the failure of the bell towers on the facade of St Peter’s was laid at his door.
When Innocent X decided to redesign Piazza Navona, where his family palace stood, he announced a competition of ideas and Bernini was not among those invited.
The account of how he got in anyway comes from his seventeenth-century biographers. Prince Niccolò Ludovisi, the pope’s nephew and an admirer of the sculptor, suggested he build the model and have it reach the pontiff by a side door. Bernini made a silver model and had it placed in the dining room of Palazzo Pamphilj. The pope walked in, saw it, and according to Baldinucci spent more than half an hour studying it.
The line attributed to the pontiff on that occasion has become proverbial: to avoid having a work by Bernini carried out, you must not look at it.
The commission came in 1648 and the work was finished in 1651.
A curious detail: the fountain cost so much that the pope funded it by pushing up the price of bread, and Roman resentment came out in pasquinades against Donna Olimpia Maidalchini, the formidable sister-in-law everyone took to be the real power at court. Piazza Navona got its masterpiece and Rome paid the bill in flour.
The four rivers, one for each continent
The idea is openly political: four great rivers for the four continents then known, and above them the obelisk with the Pamphilj dove. The message is that the Church of Rome reaches everywhere.
Bernini designed and directed, but the four statues were carved by four different collaborators. It is worth knowing who is who, because each one comes with an animal and an attribute that identifies it.
The Danube, for Europe, is by Antonio Raggi. It touches the papal coat of arms and has a horse emerging from the rock beside it.
The Ganges, for Asia, is by Claude Poussin. It holds a long oar, because the river is navigable along much of its course, and there is a dragon next to it.
The Nile, for Africa, is by Giacomo Antonio Fancelli. Its head is covered by a cloth, with a lion drinking and a palm bent by the wind.
The Río de la Plata, for the Americas, is by Francesco Baratta. It sits on a heap of coins, raises its right arm and has an armadillo beside it, an animal nobody in Europe had ever seen and which the stonecutters accordingly carved somewhat from imagination.
The coins under the Río de la Plata are not decoration: they allude to the riches of the New World, and the river’s name in Spanish means silver.
The legend of the veiled Nile, and why it does not hold
This is the story you will hear from any guide in the square. The Nile covers its eyes so as not to see the facade of Sant’Agnese in Agone, built by his rival Francesco Borromini; the Río de la Plata raises its arm to shield itself from the church’s imminent collapse. Bernini is supposed to have carved his review in marble, in front of everyone.
It is a perfect story. It is also impossible.
The fountain was finished in 1651. Borromini took over the building site of Sant’Agnese in Agone in 1653, when the four statues had already been in place for two years. Bernini could not have covered the Nile’s eyes against a facade that did not exist.
The real explanation is less theatrical and more interesting. In the seventeenth century the sources of the Nile were unknown: no European knew where that river came from, and the veil over the head is the baroque way of saying exactly that. The raised arm of the Río de la Plata, in the same way, is a gesture of astonishment from the continent discovered not long before.
Note: saying the legend is false does not mean the rivalry between the two men never existed. It was real, documented and poisonous for forty years, and I tell the whole of it in the article on Bernini and Borromini. It simply is not carved here.
There is also a detail almost nobody knows: in 1647, before the fountain project was assigned, it was Borromini himself who received the commission for the conduit that would bring 180 ounces of the Acqua Vergine to Piazza Navona. The water that fills his rival’s masterpiece was brought there by him.
The obelisk that came from the Circus of Maxentius
The red granite monolith that crowns the composition stands 16.54 metres tall, and more than thirty counting the base and the dove. Its story is as long as the fountain’s.
It is not an ancient Egyptian obelisk, even though the hieroglyphs cut into it make it look like one: it is a Roman copy from the age of Domitian, made in Rome to Egyptian conventions at that emperor’s command. In the seventeenth century it lay in pieces along the Via Appia Antica, in the Circus of Maxentius, and from there it was recovered, reassembled and carried to the square.
The hieroglyphs, read today, celebrate Roman emperors rather than pharaohs.
At the top there is not the gilded point you would expect on an obelisk but a bronze dove with an olive branch, the heraldic emblem of the Pamphilj. The same dove returns in the two marble coats of arms on the crag.
The best way to understand how the whole thing stands up is to place yourself on the long side of the square and look at the base against the light: the rock is pierced on all four sides, and the entire weight of the obelisk is carried by the spurs of stone left between the openings. In the seventeenth century this choice was read as bravado, and in part it was.
How to look at it without missing the details
Piazza Navona is crowded almost all the time, and the risk is that you circle the fountain in two minutes looking only at the obelisk.
Here is a route that works. Start on the side facing Sant’Agnese in Agone, where you find the Nile and the Río de la Plata, the two statues at the centre of the legend. Then go clockwise and pass behind, on the side towards the Corsia Agonale: from there you see the openings in the rock and the structural game becomes clear. Finish on the Danube side, where the horse comes out of the stone and which is the finest part of the whole crag.
The 2024 restoration cleaned the marble, consolidated the structure and remade the Danube’s left index finger, missing since the 1980s. If you have a photograph of the fountain taken before then, that finger is not in your picture.
When to go. The best light is early morning, before 9.00, when the square is almost empty and low sun reaches under the arches of the crag. In the evening the fountain is lit and remains very beautiful, but there are always plenty of people in front of it.
Practical information
Checked on 28 August 2026 on the page of the Sovrintendenza Capitolina. Access rules for monumental fountains depend on city regulations and can change: check before you travel.
Tickets. The fountain stands in a public square and costs nothing to see. There are no guided visits to the monument itself, but Piazza Navona is included in many historic centre tours.
Opening hours. The square is always accessible, day and night, and has no gates.
Rules worth knowing. Rome’s urban police regulations forbid sitting, lying down or climbing on monumental fountains and forbid bathing in them. Fines run into the hundreds of euros and are updated by municipal ordinance, so it is worth reading the sign posted in the square rather than trusting a figure found online.
Getting there. Piazza Navona has no metro stop. From Termini station take bus 64 or 87, get off on Corso Vittorio Emanuele and walk five minutes. From the Pantheon it is a seven-minute walk, from Campo de’ Fiori six.
How long. Twenty minutes are enough to walk right round the fountain without hurrying. Add Sant’Agnese in Agone and the square’s other two fountains and you are looking at an hour.
Beneath the square the Stadium of Domitian is still there, the first-century building that gave Piazza Navona its elongated shape, and it can be visited. If you want to understand why this square has the plan of an ancient sports arena, you can book the underground tour, which also takes in the Trevi Fountain.
What to see nearby
The Fountain of the Four Rivers is not the only work by Bernini in this area, nor the only fountain in the square: I have lined them all up in the guide to Bernini’s fountains in Rome, which works as a walking itinerary.
In Piazza Barberini you will find the Triton Fountain, his most underrated work, and on the corner of Via Veneto the tiny Bee Fountain. In Piazza di Spagna there is the Barcaccia, which is by his father Pietro.
For the artist as a whole there is the portrait in ten works by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and if you are planning your visit the three-day Rome itinerary passes through Piazza Navona on the first morning.
Photo credits. Statue of the Ganges and the agonal obelisk: Wolfgang Moroder, CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons. The other photographs are the author’s own.
