Benvenuto a Roma! Welcome to Rome!
If you want to enjoy your visit, shut your guidebook and listen to me, Rome’s most famous talking statue. I always tell the truth – with a dash of poetic license, of course –about this beautiful and sometimes brutal city. Cheeky poets and scurvy graffitists might impersonate me, but I am the one and only, the genuine and original Pasquino!
Everyone knows where to find me: right off Piazza Navona, the most glorious Baroque square in the heart of Rome, at the intersection of two cobblestone streets. The wider and longer street was once a parade route for papal elections and for public executions. Poised on blocks of ancient concrete, I stand at the back of a neoclassical palace housing the Museum of Rome: a battered, limbless torso with a weathered but noble face. I am the Eternal City’s enduring monument to sarcasm.
I began as a block of limestone, quarried at Tivoli during the Second Punic War. I yearned to be an arch, an aqueduct, or even a humble milestone, but fate sold me to a provincial magistrate, who had lost his son at the battle of Cannae in 216 BC. A lover of the Iliad, he ordered me carved into a statue of the Spartan king Menelaus cradling the body of the slain young warrior Patroclus. No wonder I have two minds about everything! For seven generations I remained in the cypress grove at the magistrate’s country villa until his last descendant perished in the purges of 43 BC. Octavian Caesar, the future Emperor Augustus, confiscated the estate and brought me to Rome.
The Caesars used me as a punitive white elephant. Whenever a general lost a battle or a governor bilked a colony, a Praetorian Guard delivered me to the offender’s estate, accompanied by a brutally ironic thank-you note from the emperor. The recipient usually committed suicide. However, in 81 AD, when the Emperor Domitian became displeased with the entire city, he placed me over the arcade of his new stadium as a warning. Four centuries later, the Vandals toppled me from my niche, smashed my face, lopped off my limbs, and buried me in a ditch.
There I lay for a thousand years . . .
Pasquino, the talking statue of Rome, in Piazza Pasquino, Rome. Used with permission.
On April 1, 1501, while excavating the foundations of a palazzo, a papal architect found me amid a heap of imperial rubbish. Delighted, he brought me to his patron, a witty cardinal, who placed me on a pedestal facing a cozy square frequented by booksellers and writers. His Eminence invited all Rome to admire me. On St. Mark’s Day, he consecrated me to Momus, the Greek god of mockery. The cardinal slipped a carnival mask over my face, draped me in a toga, and decorated my pedestal with Latin epigrams.
Such pranks were common in my neighborhood. As I said, its primary street was a parade route from St. Peter’s to the city center. Practically every month a carnival took place, so no one was surprised when anti-clerical squibs, scraps of paper pasted all over my pediment, began to appear. The culprit was a local tailor, Pasquino Mazzocchi, whose tongue was sharper than his needle. Since his trade often took him to the Vatican, Signor Pasquino knew the most delicious gossip. After his death, I assumed his name. And so I became a bulletin board for anonymous satiric poems, called pasquinades in his honor.
Authorities were outraged. Pope Adrian VI, a dour reformer elected in 1522, vowed to throw me into the Tiber, but his advisors dissuaded him. Like a frog, they explained, I would croak only louder in water. Likewise, Charles de Bourbon, whose German mercenaries sacked the city a few years later, threatened to decapitate me. If he tried, military aides warned, some joker would substitute a Jack-o-lantern for my head. Church and state were powerless. Made of stone, I could be neither excommunicated nor executed.
The pagan gods, whose presence remained strong in Christian Rome, protected me. Momus, son of Night and grandson of Chaos, cursed all foes and granted me occult powers. Fully conscious, I discovered that I was clairvoyant. Even now, I can read individual thoughts and project myself into Rome’s collective memories. Better still, I can wander the city streets without ever leaving this pedestal. Sometimes I waft about as a disembodied spirit, haunting ruins, museums, libraries, and galleries. At other times, I enter the bodies of unsuspecting passersby here in the Piazza di Pasquino: named, of course, for me.
My hosts vary. Centuries ago, I possessed mendicants, prostitutes, and buskers. Today, I prefer tour guides, journalists, and Uber drivers, people who know every nook and corner of this city and love to hear themselves talk. But my favorite avatar is an old curator at the Museum of Rome, who scorns retirement and belongs to the Free University of Antico Caffè Greco. This club of artists and intellectuals meets each month in Rome’s oldest coffeehouse. Thanks to its members, my mind is an attic filled with antique curios and collectible prints.
For almost 525 years, I have been a beloved arbiter. Famous writers, therefore, have presumed to speak in my name: including Pietro Aretino, Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, and Trilussa. But I alone am Rome’s tribune of free speech. My motto is “Pazzia Sapienza.” It means “Crazy Wisdom.” As the perennial loyal opposition and a passionate gadfly, I have criticized popes and kings, fascists and communists, conservatives and liberals. I have never betrayed my sacred office. And somehow, I have survived the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Urban Renewal, Advertising, and Tourism.
Several years ago, however, Rome’s right-wing mayor stripped off my lampoons and scrubbed and bleached me a virginal white. Henceforth, he decreed, all my notices will be posted on a sideboard mounted on a Lucite stand. Supposedly, this edict insures my preservation. Actually, it makes it easier to bowdlerize messages and stifle protest.
How could I work under these conditions? After consulting with the river god Marforio, the colossus Madama Lucrezia, and Rome’s other talking statues, I decided to write a series of columns which I am now publishing in this book. I appreciate the willingness of my secretary, Signor Di Renzo, to take dictation from an armless author.
A few years ago, the palazzo I guard was being renovated. Before construction began, workmen erected a plank-board wall around the base of the building, completely covering me. Within days, this wall was slathered in posters and scrawled with graffiti. One notice read: “You will never silence Pasquino! And you will never silence the people of Rome!”
*Excerpt from Pasquinades: Essays from Rome’s Famous Talking Statue. Cayuga Lake Books, NY, 2023.
A former copywriter, medical writer, and publicist, Anthony Di Renzo is professor of writing in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Ithaca College. He is the author four books of creative nonfiction and historical fiction. When not teaching or writing, Anthony Di Renzo sings opera in such regional companies as Savoyards Ithaca (formerly the Cornell Savoyards).
