For those of you who are visiting Rome and are after bizarre stories, look no further than this post on a famous fountain (no, not that one). Tucked away between Piazza Navona and Castel Sant’Angelo in what is now Piazza dell’Orologio, sits a fountain that looks nothing like a fountain at all: a giant stone lid over an oval basin, it’s literally like an enormous soup tureen sitting on an Italian table. This is the Fontana della Terrina, and its four-century journey around the historic center says as much about Roman humor as it does about Roman history.

The fountain was designed in 1595 by famed Giacomo della Porta, one of the most prolific fountain-makers Rome has ever seen. His resume includes the Fontana delle Tartarughe in Piazza Mattei and the fountains flanking Bernini’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in Piazza Navona, so a commission for the busy market square of Campo de’ Fiori – that’s right! Campo de’ Fiori! – was well within his wheelhouse. His original design was elegant and open: an oval basin decorated with four bronze dolphins, fed by the waters of the restored Acqua Vergine aqueduct.

Unfortunately, elegance did not survive contact with Roman street life. Campo de’ Fiori was, and still is, a working market, and vendors quickly turned the fountain into an open-air sink for washing fruit, vegetables… and worse. Papal edicts threatening corporal punishment for repeat offenders did little to help. By 1622, the city administration gave up trying to change people’s habits and did what any pragmatic Roman would do: they covered the problem.

An unknown artist was commissioned to build a heavy travertine lid, and the bronze dolphins, no longer needed, disappeared from the historical record entirely.

That travertine lid is exactly why you should never underestimate Roman wit. As soon as it went up, locals started calling the fountain “Pasticcio,” essentially “the mess” or “the botched job,” before settling on the nickname that stuck: “la Terrina,” the soup tureen, because that is precisely what it looks like from every angle.

This is far from an isolated case. Romans have a long tradition of giving irreverent nicknames to some of their most solemn monuments, almost as if grandeur alone were never quite enough to earn genuine respect.

The Vittoriano, the imposing white marble monument to Victor Emmanuel II, is affectionately known as “la macchina da scrivere” (the typewriter) for its blocky, mechanical silhouette, and just as often as “la torta nuziale” (the wedding cake) for its tiered, frosting-like layers.

Even , like Pasquino near Piazza Navona, owe their fame to this same instinct: for centuries, Romans pinned satirical verses to these statues to mock popes and politicians anonymously, turning stone into a kind of civic comedy club.

Rome, in other words, does not just build monuments. It mocks them, too!

The story of the restless Terrina doesn’t end with its lid. In 1899, the poor tureen, erm, fountain, was dismantled entirely to make room for the new monument to Giordano Bruno, which sits in the middle of Campo de’ Fiori to this day. For a quarter of a century, the Terrina was forgotten entirely, just to reappear in 1924 on Piazza della Chiesa Nuova, where it stayed until 2026. It has been moved once again, this time to Piazza dell’Orologio, to clear the way for construction work on the new Metro C station planned for Piazza della Chiesa Nuova. Our bets are on this move being the shortest of all: the subway stop should be ready by 2036.

If you find this restless behaviour surprising, you clearly haven’t met enough Roman monuments. Moving monuments to accommodate a city that keeps growing and changing is practically a Roman tradition of its own.

Take the sarcophagus-turned-fountain now standing outside Palazzo Altieri, near Palazzo Doria Pamphilj: it originally stood inside the palazzo’s courtyard before being moved to the alley where you can find it today. Similar repurposed sarcophagi still flank the ancient Porta del Popolo in Piazza del Popolo, silent reminders that Romans have never been shy about giving old stones a new job and a new address when the city needed it.

Even the elegant marble statue of the poet Pietro Metastasio, which for decades kept the Terrina company in front of Chiesa Nuova, has its own story of displacement. It was originally unveiled in Piazza San Silvestro in 1886, only to be relocated to Piazza della Chiesa Nuova in the early twentieth century, when the widening of Corso Vittorio Emanuele II reshaped that whole stretch of the city center. And after a wait of no less than 116 years, following the works on the square, the statue has finally gone back home, returning to Piazza San Silvestro, right where it was meant to stand all along.

So next time you walk past a fountain, a statue, or even an entire monument in Rome, ask yourself: is this really where it started out, or is it just the latest stop on a much longer journey?