The Water Oasis
Palazzo Venezia: the Oasis Courtyard Fountain
Despite my wish to avoid courtyard fountains, I hope you will permit me to add another exception to the few I have made already, as this time it is in the courtyard of one of the most majestic of Rome's illustrious mansions: Palazzo Venezia. Palazzo Venezia is famous in its own right for reasons that are generally well known. Here, in the "Great Courtyard" you will find a fountain springing up in the center of a little oasis.
For that is how this garden appears, with its dense thicket of very tall, motionless palm trees, where the constant yet soothing tinkling of a charming fountain brings relief to ears longing for peace and quiet.
On a pathway overhung with myrtle, statues of four children holding shields bearing the names of famous Venetian conquests (Cyprus, Dalmatia, Morea, Candia) stand at intervals on a long stone bench. Beside the pathway, in a small shallow oval lake, goldfish swim contentedly in and out of the pond plants and around their big travertine brothers spraying water from their mouths.
In the center, leaning against a cluster of rocks, three delightful and energetic tritons with their tails in the water seem to be trying by sheer strength to hold up a double shell. In this position, they look rather like the two tritons at Santa Maria in Cosmedin. On the shell stands the City of Venice; wearing a cloak and the pointed hat of the doges, she smilingly throws a golden ring into the water in the traditional "Marriage of Venice to the Sea." On one side, the winged lion of St. Mark crouches at her feet; on the other, a laughing child clings to her flowing baroque robe, holding an unfurled scroll inscribed with a Latin text.
The inscription reads: "The Ambassador Barbon Morosini seeing the residents of this palazzo and of those nearby suffering from a scarcity of water -- a supply already provided first by Pope Alexander VIII and then by Benedict XIII -- diverted this water from the Trevi conduit and erected this fountain in the Year of the Lord 1730."
