Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

013. Piazza Montecavallo

Explore Map

Explore Map


 

1822


 

1981

July 1819 The fountain on the Quirinal, or rather the group formed by the statues the obelisk, & the fountain is however the most admirable of all. From the Piazza Quirinale...you see the boundless ocean of domes spires & columns which is the city of Rome. On a pedestal of white marble rises an obelisk of red granite piercing the blue sky. Before it is a vast basin of porphyry, in the midst of which rises a column of the purest water which collects into itself all the overhanging colours of the sky, and breaks them into a thousand prismatic hues and graduated shadows—they fall together with its dashing water-drops into the outer basin.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters, II, 88–89