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Giovanni Fontana, brother of Domenico, should design for the Acqua Paola on the opposite slope
of the Janiculum a yet more glorious fountain which should dispense five times the amount of
water given out by the fountain of Sixtus V. All this was done, and from the heights of the
Janiculum the great stream descended in various channels, and was widely spread over the Trastevere
or that portion of the city lying on the western side of the Tiber. One channel found another fine
outlet in the fountain which Carlo Maderno, nephew of Fontana, also built for Paul V on the northern
side of the Square of St. Peter's. From thence the water was conducted down the Via Alessandrina
(now the Borgo Nuovo) to this small piazza of the Scossa Cavalli where Maderno constructed for it this
second and very properly less splendid fountain. Thus it will be seen that the water as well as the
architectural part of this fountain belongs to the beginning of the seventeenth century; but the interest
attaching to the buildings surrounding the square in which it stands dates back farther than that,
dates back in fact to the crowded days of the High Renaissance, when this prosaic little piazza was
a centre of ardent and vivid life.
The long, plain, yet dignified building to the south, now called the Ora Penitenzieri, was built by
Cardinal Domenico della Rovere, who was one of the nephews of Pope Sixtus IV and brother to Pope Julius II,
the friend and patron of Michelangelo. To the west, and on the corner made by the square and the street
of the Borgo Nuovo, stands the house built by Bramante, and purchased by Raphael. The atelier of the
"divine painter" is the corner room on the second floor. Against the wall behind those gloomy windows stood
his last picture, "The Transfiguration," unfinished; and on a bed placed at the foot of that picture, Raphael
died.
Another death agony is connected with the history of the square, for in the gardens behind the palace to
the north, now called Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia, was held that fatal supper where the Borgias, father and son,
fell victims to the poison which they had prepared for the cardinal who was their host and the owner of the
palace. Even the legends of classic Rome seem somewhat colorless compared with the memories which haunt this
dull little square. Nothing could be more prosaic than its present-day appearance. It is truly "empty, swept,
and garnished," but the devils which have gone out of it have seldom had their equal; its memories belong to
a more splendid and to a more shameful past than is the heritage of any other city of our modern world.
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