The Mouth of Truth in Rome: is one photo worth the queue?

Where it is and what it costs

The Mouth of Truth, Bocca della Verità in Italian, stands against the wall of the portico of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, at Piazza della Bocca della Verità 18. The church is open daily from 9:30 to 17:50 and closed only on 1 January; the mask keeps the same hours.

Entry is free. An attendant with a donation box stands by the mask: in 2016 the rector introduced EUR 2 per photo to raise money for restoring the church, and that has been the accepted amount ever since. There is no official price list and it is now mostly described as voluntary, but EUR 2 in coins is fair. The rule from the same time is one photo per person, and you get about a minute at the mask.

And the thing people get wrong: the queue is only for the mask. Walk straight past it into the church. Plenty of visitors mistake the line for the church entrance and leave without ever looking inside.

How long you will wait

The trick: start your day here rather than end it here. At 9:30 you are among the first at the mask, then on to the Circus Maximus and the Palatine, and by noon, when this is at its busiest, you are long gone. If you do find yourself in the square at lunchtime, go up to the portico railings: the mask is visible and photographable with no queue, just without a hand in its mouth.

What it really is

A marble disc with a bearded face: 175 cm across, 20 cm thick, about 1.3 tonnes — the figures given by the church’s own website. The eyes, nostrils and mouth go right through. Most likely it was an ancient drain cover; it is linked either to the Temple of Hercules across the road or to the Cloaca Maxima, Rome’s great sewer. The face is taken to be a sea god, usually Oceanus. Dates vary, with most opinion settling on the 1st century. The disc was set in the portico in 1632.

The legend is medieval: tell a lie with your hand in the mouth and it will be bitten off. The church website retells the story of an unfaithful wife who outwitted the stone. Her lover pretended to be a madman and embraced her on the way to the mask, and she swore that no one had touched her except her husband and that lunatic. Technically true, hand intact. It is exactly the story to tell a child while you wait.

The mask became world-famous through Roman Holiday in 1953. Gregory Peck puts his hand in the mouth and pulls it out “without a hand”, hidden up his sleeve, and Audrey Hepburn’s scream is real: the gag was thought up on set and nobody warned her. Show your child the scene the night before and they will know exactly what to do at the mask.

What is nearby and worth more than the queue

• The church itself. Free to enter. A seven-storey 12th-century bell tower, a floor of coloured marble, and in a side altar a flower-crowned skull in a glass reliquary, venerated as the relic of St Valentine. Beneath the church is an 8th-century crypt, one of the oldest in Rome; a voluntary donation is asked to go down.
• Two temples across the road. The round Temple of Hercules Victor from the late 2nd century BC is the oldest marble building in Rome to survive largely intact; for centuries it was mistaken for a Temple of Vesta. Next to it is the rectangular Temple of Portunus, god of gates and harbours, which survived because it became a church in the 9th century. They are not usually open, but you can walk right round both.
• The Circus Maximus, five minutes’ walk. The field where chariots raced, and children can run the length of it.
• The mouth of the Cloaca Maxima. From the Ponte Palatino you can see the arch in the embankment where ancient Rome’s main sewer still empties into the Tiber. A good companion piece to a “drain cover”.

The mask sits halfway between the Forum and Trastevere, so it fits better into a route than as a trip of its own. How we tie the ancient centre into a single day is in Rome in one day with a child. Other places where you pay nothing are in ten free places in Rome, and the evening can carry on across the river: where to walk in Trastevere.