Roma - Fontane

Piazza Mattei
Fontana delle Tartarughe

The splendid fountain known as “the Tortoise” is a magical creation by Giacomo della Porta that admirably combines water, architecture and sculpture. It is also happily inserted into a corner of Rome that has remained more or less the same as when it was built. In 1570 a fountain should have been placed in the nearby ghetto in Piazza Giudia but on the intervention of the Mattei family it was built here in 1581, whilst the ghetto only got its fountain in 1591 (see the fountain in piazza Cinque Scole). Four large marble shells rest in the centre of a wide basin with a square base and concave sides, above which are four static bronze ephebes with their foot on the head of a bronze dolphin. The ephebes, all in the same position, raise their arm towards the overhanging marble shell. In the original plans another four bronze dolphins, perhaps the same ones that initially decorated the fountain in Campo de’ Fiore, should have been found where the tortoises are now, but were inserted half way through the 17th century after its first restoration.