Someone's responsible for the unthinkable--damaging one of Rome's most famous fountains on Piazza Navona by breaking off pieces and beheading figures from the pink marble. Video shows a man who breaks Rome's Fontaine du Maure in Piazza Navona while using a rock as a weapon. Police have the pieces. And it's a replica, one that in itself is over a hundred years old.
The Italian fountain was vandalized on Rome's Piazza Navona early in the morning and police in Italy are launching a search using security camera footage to find the vandal responsible destroying part of the pink marble on the south end of the square, where a Moor is engaged in battle with a dolphin -- surrounded by four Tritons. Unfortunately security footage is about all police have got. Stone fragments were ripped off the Fontaine du Maure -- or "Moor Fountain" and law enforcement was able to recover the torn pieces. But it's not yet clear whether the pieces from the damaged statue can be reattached.
A favorite among tourists visiting Italy, the damaged fountain was originally designed by Giocomo della Porta in 1575 with Bernini adding the statue of the Moor in 1653 nearly 80 years later. Fortunately for Italy, someone was thinking ahead -- possibly while 100 or so years behind schedule: The original Fontaine du Maure statues were removed for restoration work nearly 140 years ago in 1874, to the Villa Borghese and replaced with copies. So a lack of expediency seems to have saved the real statues from a beheading -- the 40-plus-year-old vandal seen wearing a dark shirt with jeans while physically climbing into the fountain and using a rock to whack at the statue and decapitate some of the smaller figures on Rome's Fontaine du Maure.