As at the other five "talking statues", pasquinades—irreverent satires poking fun at public figures—were posted beside Marforio in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Marforio is a large 1st century Roman marble sculpture of a reclining bearded river god or Oceanus,[4] which in the past has been variously identified as a depiction of Jupiter, Neptune, or the Tiber.

[6] Poggio Bracciolini wrote of it as one of the sculptures surviving from Antiquity,[7] and in the early 16th century it was still near the Arch of Septimius Severus, where the various authors reported it.

It was discovered with a granite basin bearing the inscription mare in foro,[9] but may take its name from the Latin name for the area in which it was discovered (Martis Forum), or from the Marioli (or Marfuoli) family who owned property near the Mamertine Prison, also near the forum, where the statue was sat until 1588.

Pope Sixtus V had the statue moved to the Piazza San Marco, (in Rome) in 1588, and then to the piazza del Campidoglio in 1592, where it decorates a fountain designed by Giacomo della Porta on a wall of the Basilica di Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, facing the Palazzo dei Conservatori.