If you go to Piazza Navona I advice you to start looking around, forgetting for a moment the splendid palaces, the basilica by Borromini and the Fountain of the Four Rivers by Bernini. Forget that Piazza Navona could be the perfect location for nice experiences, like a cooking class (there is for example Eat and Walk Italy which provides that, and I will suggest it). Sharpening the view (I will not say where, however, try in search of you), on a wall above the sign of a restaurant you find this disturbing marble head. It almost looks like a marble mask, a man trying to get out at all cost from the wall! What is it? Why is it here? Here's the story...

We are at the end of the XVI century, when the pope was Sisto V, Felice Peretti. In just 5 years of the papacy, from 1585 to 1590, the Pope, was concerned with a lot of security and justice, the themes he so dear that the public executions, in those measly 5 years, multiplied to excess. More or less common criminals were usually killed on the gallows, both as a warning and to show everyone how Sixtus V would like to administrate justice in a good and perfect way. It is true that the Rome of that period was anything but a safe city: robbers, murderers, the poor, hungry not lesinavano to also use weapons to extort food and money, the men and women who cheated the passers-by while playing cards and not only...in short, the Eternal City was certainly not the safest place in the world! In addition, as a good administrator of an area as vast and important as Rome, the Pope thought very much to his own reputation.

For this reason, it seems that he loved to go out in an anonymous way, dressed as a normal populate and going around Rome to listen to what the populace had to say. Also doing some direct questions, he wanted to know what the populace thought of him. One day he went to a tavern to the Piazza Navona, speaking with the innkeeper. The man, having figured out who really had before, he said what they really thought of Sixtus V. All unflattering things, apparently! The innkeeper criticized the way in which the Pontiff had to deal with things in Rome. It seems that the Pope came out from the tavern was particularly satisfied with, but in a manner quite devious...the day after the innkeeper saw placed in front of his local, where a  scaffold was waiting for him. Never would have thought that the wooden platform was destined to him, something that only released when the armed guards led him to their own weight over there, on that sad gallows, for many Romans, it had become common to see. The innkeeper asked for forgiveness, but no one, nor pope Sixtus V, granted it. So it was that the innkeeper was promptly hanged for his words and for the criticism leveled directly at the Pope. It seems, finally, that his friends (they are heedless of the danger of possible retaliation skullcaps), then attached them on the wall, in front of the tavern, this marble head depicting the innkeeper. A memory of a man who simply said simply what he thought. But maybe to the wrong person...