Ancient editorials
The Pasquino is the most famous of Rome's "Talking Statues"
This ancient, ruinous statue of a Roman warrior has for centuries served as the voice of Rome's witty oppressed—sort of the editorial essays and political cartoons or the era—a political soapbox for those who've wanted to voice their opinions anonymously by writing them on plaques hung around the statue's neck.
The tradition is by no means dead—though Latin is rarely used these days, and it has evolved into pasted-up computer print-outs and scrawls of graffiti on the surrounding walls. Pasquino and his friends (the fellow "talking statues" of Babuino, on Via del Babuino, and Marforio, on the Campidoglio, as well as several busts in the Villa Borghese and atop the Gianicolo) continue to hold forth on everything from Italian popular culture to American politcal scandals to the Euro monetary union.
Pasquino himself is named after one of the earliest and most famous of these Roman wags, a late medieval agitator who, though anonymous, was widely known to be a local barber named Pasquino.
A few years ago, when the Palazzo Braschi against which the Pasquino stands, was being worked on, the workmen erected, as usual, a plankboard wall around the base of the building. Within days the wall was slathered in posters, papers, and grafitti along the lines "Help, I can't see!" and "Hey, where did everybody go?" and "You cannot silence Pasquino!"
By the following week, workers had rejiggered the wall so that it tucked in on either side of Pasquino, revealing him to the public once again and allowing him to hold forth in freedom.
Piazza del Pasquino, just off the southwest corner of Piazza Navona.
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This article was last updated in January 2007. All information was accurate at the time.
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Copyright © 1998–2008 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.
