
— — the fountains running where the runners ran.
“The piazza keeps the shape of the Stadium of Domitian beneath it: a long oval where Romans once watched runners and now watch the light cross Bernini's Four Rivers fountain. The obelisk at the centre, the Borromini church on the west side, the cafés along the long curve. At Christmas the Befana stalls fill the space; in late afternoon, families and street painters move through. Three fountains. One church. One pope's family square, opened to the city. Nobody hurries.

Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
Piazza Navona sits in the centro storico of Rome, in Rione VI Parione, with the Pantheon about 250 metres to the east and Campo de' Fiori a short walk south. The piazza preserves the elongated outline of the Stadium of Domitian, built around 86 AD to host athletic contests called agones. The Greek word drifted through 'in agone' and 'n'agone' into the name Navona. The space measures roughly 240 metres long and 65 wide, and was paved as a public square in the 15th century after the stadium ruins had served centuries as housing and workshops. Pope Innocent X (Giovanni Battista Pamphilj), elected in 1644, transformed it into a Baroque set piece centred on his family's palace, now the Brazilian embassy.
Three fountains and one church set the piazza's stone. Bernini's Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, completed in 1651 for Innocent X, stands at the centre: four river gods (the Danube, the Nile, the Ganges, and the Río de la Plata) hold up a 16-metre obelisk carved for Domitian in Aswan granite, brought here from the Circus of Maxentius on the Via Appia. At the south end the Fontana del Moro has a basin by Giacomo della Porta from 1575 and a central Moor figure by Bernini from 1653. At the north end the Fontana del Nettuno waited basinless from 1574 until its sculptures arrived in 1878. Borromini's Sant'Agnese in Agone, finished in 1672, closes the west side.
From early December through the Epiphany on January 6, the piazza becomes the Mercato della Befana, a long-running Christmas market built around the Italian folk figure of la Befana, the old woman who flies on a broom and leaves sweets or coal for children on the eve of Epiphany. Stalls fill the long oval with carbone dolce (sugar coal), torrone, nativity figures, calze toys, and panettone. By mid-January the stalls are gone and the piazza returns to its everyday rhythm of street painters, café tables, and the slow tourist clock that turns through Rome's centro storico. Late September into early October is the quieter season, before the holiday build.