When you contemplate a fly on the wall, I doubt that you ever imagine that fly reporting back what it has seen and heard. You know, chin-wagging about the goings-on of a body politic, dishing on gossip, scandalmongering. I doubt, too, that you ever imagine the wall being the one—er, the thing—doing the talking. 

Such might be deemed the conceit of Anthony Di Renzo’s book, Pasquinades: Essays From Rome’s Famous Talking Statue. The hook is that the infamous talking statue, Pasquino, is put forth as some cross between flesh and stone, with the historical vantage of one endowed with a Janus Face and the rhetorical verve of a ventriloquist.