Bocca della Verità

"...The sewers of ancient Rome answered their purpose pretty well, especially if we take into consideration the remote age in which they were constructed, and their engineers' ignorance of modern sanitary principles and of the theory of microbes. Their greatest defects are, first, that they were used at the same time to carry off the sewage and refuse of the town and the rain-water ; second, that this double employment made it necessary to have large openings along the streets, so that the population was permanently brought in contact with the poisonous effluvia of the sewers. Many of these mouths of drains have come down to us, some exceedingly rough and primitive, some more elaborate and cut in marble. The most celebrated, perhaps, is the so-called Bocca della Verita, a marble disc, five feet in diameter, with the head of the Ocean in alto-relievo in the centre, through the open mouth of which the rain-water would escape. This monument, the scarecrow of children who show an inclination to lie, is preserved in the portico of the church of S. Maria in Cosmedin, near the ancient forum Boarium. The third defect of Roman sewage was that each sewer emptied directly into the Tiber, thus polluting its waters, which were used not only for bathing and swimming, but even for drinking. .."

Ancient Rome
in the light of recent excavations

Author: Rodolfo Lanciani
Editor:Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston and New York
Published: 1890


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