The famous Roman Mouth of the Truth was the manhole of a sewer
Who would have thought: over the centuries a manhole in the Cloaca Massima has become one of the most loved and photographed Roman monuments by tourists.
The Bocca della Verità is an ancient mask in pavonazzetto marble, walled into the wall of the pronaos of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome since 1632. The mask represents a large bearded male face; eyes, nose and mouth are pierced and hollow. The face has been interpreted over time as a representation of various subjects: Jupiter Ammon, the ocean god, an oracle or a faun.
The object is mentioned in the first Mirabilia Urbis Romae, an ancient medieval guide for pilgrims, where the mouth was assigned the power to formulate oracles.
In the Middle Ages the legend spread that the Mouth of Truth was built to dispel doubts about the fidelity of husbands and wives.
The name “Mouth of Truth” appeared in 1485 and the sculpture has since always been mentioned among the Roman curiosities and was reproduced in drawings and prints. Originally the mouth was located outside the church porch. It was moved to the portico with the restorations commissioned by Pope Urban VIII Barberini in 1631.
But there are other folk tales about the mouth. In the Middle Ages the legend spread that it was Virgilio Marone Grammatico, a scholar of the sixth century (namesake of the Mantuan poet Virgilio), who practiced magic, to build the Mouth of Truth, for husbands and wives who had doubted the fidelity of the spouse .
In the 15th century, Italian and German travelers remember this stone “which is called the tombstone of truth, which in ancient times had the virtue of showing when a woman had made a mistake on her husband”.
In another German legend of the fifteenth century there is talk of an unfaithful woman who, led by her very suspicious husband to the Mouth of Truth to be tested by her, managed to save her hand with a cunning.
The Bocca della Verità then achieved further notoriety thanks to the scene of the famous film Roman Holiday, with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, where the American actor in the scene pretends to have lost his hand inside his mouth. It seems that the actress believed that the legend was true and the scare in the film therefore real.
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