Pasquino: the statue that mocked the popes

An ancient hero, battered to bits

That torso is the remnant of an ancient sculptural group, a copy of a Hellenistic original. Most likely it showed Menelaus carrying the dead Patroclus. Florence's Loggia dei Lanzi has another copy, in far better shape. Rome's, to put it kindly, has seen better days.

In 1501 Cardinal Oliviero Carafa had it set up on a pedestal at the corner of what's now Palazzo Braschi. And it wasn't just a bit of old junk: Bernini put it on his list of favourite ancient sculptures. In fact, it was the one surprise on that list compared with traditional taste. The great Baroque sculptor clearly didn't mind the missing face.

From learned festival to mockery

Carafa turned a curious custom into an annual festival. Every 25 April, St Mark's Day, the statue was dressed up as a god or a figure from antiquity and hung with Latin epigrams. Printed booklets of those poems survive from 1509 to 1525. The Treccani encyclopaedia describes them as pedantic, fawning exercises. No pope lost any sleep.

But the papers changed their tune. Under Pope Leo X, and above all during the conclave that elected his successor, Adrian VI, Pasquino turned into the voice of political satire. The verses appeared in the small hours and were read first thing. Sometimes Pasquino himself did the talking, in the first person. Latin at first, and later Italian, so that anyone could follow.

The beauty of it was the anonymity. Who was the author? No one: it was Pasquino talking. And good luck demanding an explanation from a lump of marble.

The jibes even ended up in print. In 1544 the humanist Celio Secondo Curione gathered a collection of anti-Catholic satires into two printed volumes, the Pasquillorum tomi duo. What had started as a scholars' game had become something else entirely.

Barbarians and Barberini

The most famous pasquinade takes aim at the Pantheon. Pope Urban VIII, a Barberini, had the bronze beams stripped from the portico roof. Rome answered with a Latin pun: Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini. "What the barbarians didn't do, the Barberini did."

We don't know who wrote it. And if anyone tells you with great confidence exactly where that bronze ended up, take it with a pinch of salt: the sources we've read don't say.

The Congress of Wits

Pasquino didn't talk alone. Rome had a small band of "talking statues", known as the Congresso degli arguti: the Congress of Wits. Its members included Madama Lucrezia, with her disfigured face; Marforio, a reclining god, perhaps Ocean or a river, in the courtyard of the Palazzo Nuovo on the Capitoline; and two fountains, the Facchino and the Babuino. The latter is a Silenus so ugly that Romans nicknamed it "the baboon", and the nickname ended up naming the street.

Then there's the Abate Luigi, a late Roman figure in a toga, whom the people named after a cleric of the church of the Sudario who bore a certain resemblance to him. He's been moved several times, has stood on the corner of Piazza Vidoni since 1924, and has no head: it was stolen again and again.

And they talked among themselves. The statues traded barbs from one end of the city to the other, and Marforio played Pasquino's straight man, with questions and answers. In his book Roma nova, from 1660, Theodor Sprenger even gave them a social rank: the nobles had Pasquino, the citizens had Marforio and the common people had the Facchino.

A word that stuck

Those satires came to be known as pasquinades. Spanish went one better and kept a word of its own: pasquín, an anonymous, mocking sheet put up for all to see. So any Spanish speaker who uses it is quoting, without realising, a battered torso on a Roman street corner.

The character turns up on other monuments too. Across the river in Trastevere, the monument to Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, a poet who left more than two thousand sonnets written in romanesco, Rome's everyday speech, has Pasquino on its base, among ordinary Romans. Good company for a poet.

Fact or legend.

• Fact: the torso is a badly damaged ancient copy; Carafa installed it in 1501; from the early sixteenth century it was the great loudspeaker for anonymous satire against popes and the powerful; the Barberini quip is real and targets the Pantheon's bronze.
• Legend: the name. According to late traditions, Pasquino was a tailor with a shop nearby; others say a schoolmaster, a barber or an innkeeper. None of them is proven.
• Unconfirmed: who wrote the Barberini quip, and exactly where the portico's bronze went.

Where to hear it

Pasquino and the Abate Luigi each have their own stop on "Piazza Navona and Campo de' Fiori", the route of the ones who wouldn't keep quiet, alongside Caravaggio and Giordano Bruno. And you'll hear the Barberini quip in front of the Pantheon's portico on "The Pantheon, the Minerva and Piazza Colonna", Podtour's free route in Rome.

If you're planning your trip, our Rome guide has the practical side covered.

Further reading

• Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, "Pasquino", Treccani online encyclopaedia (in Italian). https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/pasquino/
• Sovrintendenza Capitolina, "Statue parlanti" (in Italian). https://www.sovraintendenzaroma.it/content/statue-parlanti
• Sovrintendenza Capitolina, "Statua detta dell'Abate Luigi" (in Italian). https://www.sovraintendenzaroma.it/content/statua-detta-dell%E2%80%99abate-luigi
• Roma Capitale, Turismo Roma, "The talking statues". https://www.turismoroma.it/en/page/talking-statues
• S. B. Platner and T. Ashby, "Pantheon", A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, Oxford University Press, 1929, on LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Europe/Italy/Lazio/Roma/Rome/_Texts/PLATOP*/Pantheon.html
• Real Academia Española, "pasquín", Diccionario de la lengua española (in Spanish). https://dle.rae.es/pasqu%C3%ADn