One of the most photographed symbols of Rome is the “Bocca della Verità”, the “Mouth of Truth”. Made famous in the world by the Hollywood film “Roman Holidays”, produced at the beginning of the 1950s, it counts now an incredible number of people (tourists and simple citizens) that take pictures with it every day, usually with their hand in its mouth. What is really incredible and maybe unique about this work is that it isn’t an artistic masterpiece nor a product of Roman engineering. It isn’t even a monument with a particular historical importance or symbolic value.

It is just a drain cover, probably for the Cloaca Maxima, the major sewer of ancient Rome. Fastened in 1632 to a wall of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin’s portico, in the space where once there was the Forum Boarium, this drain cover is simply a giant marble disc (Pavonazzetto) 1,75 m wide and almost 20 cm thick. The total weight of the disc is really significant: we are talking about 1300 kilograms. As we said before, it is fastened to a wall, but it also rests on a corinthian capitol from the imperial period. Before its current location, it occupied a spot out of the church, leaning against its external wall. This drain cover is decorated as the head of a fluvial deity keeping its mouth open to “drink” rain and not only. Waters and various liquids could also pass through the eyes and the nostrils, perforated appositely to satisfy this necessity. We should say, for the sake of information, that some scholars, because of the austere aspect and the thick beard of the male character carved in the marble disc, think it could be the king of gods, Jupiter. Is it plausible that Romans placed the portrait of Jupiter on a drain cover? It wouldn’t have been completely impossible, since the “queen” of sewers, the Cloaca Maxima, had as guardian deity the goddess of beauty and love, Venus (which was called, where necessary Venus Cloacina, to which a small shrine in the Roman Forum was dedicated) But why do tourists line up, even for hours, to take a picture with their hand in the mouth of this big mask-like disc? Well, this drain cover is the protagonist of a Medieval legend, survived thanks to some 15th century chroniclers. According to them, it was used to recognize adultresses. Women suspected of adultery had to put their hand inside the mouth, and if it was cut off, it meant that they actually were adultresses. An incredibly powerful mean men had do discover their wives infidelities, no doubt about it! Another legend, always from the Middle Ages, reports that the Mouth of Truth (whose name appears for the first time in a text of 1485) was built in the 6th century CE by an expert of magical arts, a certain Virgilio, and that it was used to to unmask adulterous spouses, male and female. It is certainly a more politically correct version of the legend. Nevertheless, according to a story whose origins are unknown, there once was someone who succeeded in tricking the Mouth. It’s a woman that, the day in which her husband had to put her on “trial”, asked her lover to blend into the crowd, surely large, and, pretending to be mad, to kiss her. He did so, and the woman, before inserting the hand in the hole, swore that, except she had never kissed anyone except her husband and that man. It was most certainly true, and the Mouth of Truth was tricked. Only a woman could succeed in doing so!

Giuseppe Rosselli