Bocca della Verità

Lonely Planet review

A round piece of marble once used as an ancient manhole cover, the Bocca della Verità (Mouth of Truth) is one of Rome's great curiosities. According to legend, if you put your right hand in the carved mouth and tell a lie, the mouth will snap shut and bite your hand off. Apparently, priests used to put scorpions in the mouth to perpetuate the myth and Roman husbands used it to test their wives' fidelity.

Fans of the film Roman Holiday will know it from the scene where Gregory Peck pretends to lose his hand and draws shrieks of unscripted terror from Audrey Hepburn. The mouth lives in the portico of the beautiful Chiesa di Santa Maria in Cosmedin. In its current form the church dates to the 12th century, when the seven-storey bell tower and portico were added and the floor, high altar and schola cantorum (choir) were decorated with Cosmati inlaid marble. However, in its original form it goes back to the 8th century, when Pope Hadrian built it by merging an arcaded colonnade from a Roman market with walls from a 7th-century Christian welfare centre. There's not much left of the original structure but you can still see a fragment of 8th-century mosaic in the souvenir shop.