Every year, in the village of Marino in the Roman countryside, there is a riotous festival to celebrate a centuries-old battle. In the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, the naval army of the Holy League, comprised of the major Catholic maritime states, triumphed over the Ottoman Empire.

The last in a series of great wars fought between the Spanish (Catholic) and the Ottoman (Muslim) empires for dominion over the Mediterranean, Lepanto came to symbolize the superior morality of the Christian West over the Islamic East.1 Such a military and moral victory, perhaps, demands a monument to mark it, and the small city of Marino, 13 miles southeast of Rome and home to one of the prominent Italian combatants, obliged in 1632 by erecting the Fountain of the Four Moors.