More than just a large male marble face near the heart of Rome, the Bocca della Verità is above all a medieval legend about the existence of a statue that would bite the hand of anyone who lied while placing it inside. This 1891 text was written by Ersilia Caetani Lovatelli, one of the rare female archaeologists and antiquities scholars in Italian society at the time. After lamenting public indifference to the curious Roman object, Lovatelli traces its transformation from manhole cover for wastewater drainage, to agentive sculpture capable of revealing the truth. Central to her analysis is the paradox of equivocal oaths: how clever individuals defeat such tests through technically truthful statements that deliberately deceive. Today, the Bocca is a tourist attraction, with thousands of tourists every year repeating and photographing the same centuries-old gesture. This translation preserves the original text in full, but we have added images from art history and popular culture to accompany it.
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