The Rome Index
Piazza Barberini & Capuchin Crypt
Bernini's Triton Fountain — and the most macabre attraction in Rome, one street away.
Piazza Barberini
A busy traffic hub redeemed by Bernini's Triton Fountain at its center — one of his most dynamic works, with four dolphins supporting a muscular sea god blowing water skyward, carved in 1642.
The Capuchin Crypt
Four crypts below Santa Maria della Concezione are decorated entirely with the bones of around 3,700 Capuchin monks — arranged into elaborate patterns of skulls, vertebrae and femurs. Morbid, extraordinary, and absolutely genuine. Small entry fee; photography not permitted inside.
The inscription
A sign at the entrance reads: "What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be." It sets the tone perfectly for what follows.
The Bernini fountain detail
The Triton Fountain at the piazza's centre, by Bernini, depicts the sea god blowing a conch shell, water arcing from the shell itself — a design later echoed and expanded upon in his own son's later work, and a useful early example of Bernini's water-feature style before the more famous Piazza Navona commission.
The Capuchin Crypt connection
The Capuchin Crypt, with its bone-decorated chapels, sits just off the piazza — an easy, if tonally jarring, combination with the fountain and nearby Palazzo Barberini gallery, making this small piazza a surprisingly dense cluster of very different experiences within a few minutes' walk of each other.
