fontane storiche di Napoli e della Reggia di Caserta

HISTORIC FOUNTAINS IN NAPLES AND IN CASERTA

With our schoolmates we have done a project about some historic fountains in Naples and its surroundings.

Last December 4^th, we went to Caserta to visit the Royal Palace. That Palace was begun in 1752 by the famous architect Luigi Vanvitelli for the Bourbon King Charles III who dreamt of another Versailles and it was completed in 1774. The Palace has an immense park with fountains, basins, fishponds, gardens and statues. The park is partly on a hillside and ends with a broad stairway: at the top there is the Large Cascade: an impressive waterfall whose huge volume of water “feeds” all the other fountains. Each of them represents a Greek or a Roman myth. For example, the main fountain represents the Diana and Acteon myth: Acteon was hunting when he surprised the goddess Diana while she was bathing. For punishment (for having dared to look at her naked), he was transformed into a deer and torn to pieces by his own dogs.

In Naples there are a lot of historic fountains.

In the past, fountains were mostly built leant against a wall, often of a building, to supply with water the surrounding houses or as a watering place for horses. In fact the most ancient fountains had a low basin which collected the water pouring out from one or more pipes placed on the wall.

In Egiziaca street, there is the Fountain of the Capone. It was built in the first half of the sixteenth century, after the arrival in Naples of Pedro de Toledo, the new Spanish viceroy. He played an important role in the history of the Kingdom of Naples and of its capital city, with social, economic and urban changes.

The fountain has a semicircular basin and is leaned against one of the walls of Annunziata’s Hospital in Egiziaca Street. The bottom of the basin consists of five alternate white and grey stone slabs. Water poured out from the mouths of three grotesque carved human faces placed on the wall,

but only the central one, which was the biggest of the three, remains today.

This is the reason why it is called Fountain of the Capone, which means big head.

The Fountain of Spinacorona, leant against one of the walls of Santa Caterina Spinacorona’s Church, in Guacci Nobile Street, is the oldest fountain in Naples because in the same place, according to historical documents, a public fountain had been built in 1139, when a fire broke out in the town. In the first half of the sixteenth century Don Pedro de Toledo, commissioned its rebuilding to the sculptor Giovanni da Nola.

The fountain has a rectangular basin in white marble, with Baroque decorations of garlands of flowers and of the viceroy’s coats of arms. On the sides there are two slabs of marble with high relieves which represent the coats of arms of the Spanish king Charles V, symbolic columns and geometric ornaments. The basin is overhung by the sculpture of the Mermaid Parthenope, an imaginary half-human sea creature, with the head and trunk of a woman and the tail of a fish, who is the symbol of Naples. She is represented in the act of extinguishing the fire of the Vesuvius with the water which pours out from her breasts. This is the reason why in Naples they usually call it "Fontana delle Zizze”, that is of the breasts.

In the history of Naples, its fountains have had great importance, because they were also means to celebrate the power and the generosity of the sovereigns or governors who built them, like the Fountain of Sebeto and the Fountain of the Artichoke .

The Fountain of Sebeto was commissioned by Manuel Zuniga y Fonseca, the Spanish viceroy, to the famous architect Cosimo Fanzago, and to his son Carlo, in 1635. It was placed in Cesario Console Street but in 1939 it was moved to Caracciolo Street, (near Largo Sermoneta), on the seafront. The monument is composed of a plinth of piperno on which there is a base in marble with three basins. On the sides we find two obelisks, in the centre there is a round arch surmounted by a memorial tablet and by the coats of arms of the city, of the viceroy and of the king of Spain. Under the arch, on the sides, there are two Tritons, mythological sea-gods, represented as men with fish’s tails who carry tridents and shell-trumpets. In the centre there is a sculpture that represents Sebeto, the mythical river that once ran through Naples and flowed into the sea not far from where the fountain was first placed.

The Fountain of the Artichoke was commissioned in the 1950s by Achille Lauro, who was the mayor of Naples at that time, in Trieste e Trento Square. It consists of a circular basin on a wide base surrounded by a flowerbed; a form that denotes its ornamental function. Water springs from the top of a metal sculpture, a kind of cup shaped like a corolla. For this reason, people in Naples have called it Fountain of the Artichoke.