Piazza Pretoria

With splendid churches and imposing baronial palaces, this square has always represented the beating heart of the city. It is the greatest symbol of municipal power and the place of residence the highest local government official: the City Magistrate. To add prestige to the “Piano del Prestore”, where the majestic municipal palace stands, the Senate of Palermo decided to embellish the piazza in front of it. What could have been better than a monumental fountain?

“A stupendous fountain that has no equal in Florence, or perhaps in Italy”, wrote Giorgio Vasari in his famous Lives, in reference to this monumental work, brought from Tuscany to become the symbol of the urban rebirth of sixteenth-century Palermo.

The fountain had been originally commissioned to the great Florentine sculptor Francesco Camilliani by the noble De Toledo family, former Viceroys of Naples and Sicily and relatives of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I of the Medici, to enhance the garden of their villa in Florence.

The work to create the sculptural elements and architectural furnishings of the garden probably began before 1553 and took Camilliani and his collaborators, including Michelangelo Naccherino, several years, continuing throughout the decade and beyond. In fact, in 1562, Bartolomeo Ammannati was still making ninety wooden columns intended to support a pergola in front of the main fountain.

The fountain has an elliptical plan, with a circumference of about 133 metres and a height of 12.90 metres. On the first level, it is surrounded by elegant balustrades, interrupted by four large accesses, each delimited by a pair of colossal male and female half-figures. On the second level, divided up by four flights of steps, there are four fish ponds, each with six niches decorated with small heads of animals and monsters, with water spouting from their nostrils... a scenographic bestiary that ranges from bucolic sheep to a more exotic rhinoceros. At the border of each fish pond, personifications of the city’s four ancient rivers, the Papireto, the Gabriele, the Maredolce and the Oreto, recline in front of the gushing basins flanked by Tritons, Nereids and Sirens. At the corners of the balustrades enclosing each of the four flights of steps, there are sixteen statues representing various mythological figures. Inside the fountain there are statues of the gods of Olympus and the deities of pleasure and abundance. The complex culminates in a large pool, from which two marine monsters emerge bearing a first basin with four marble geese and a group of sea horses, dolphins and sirens beneath a second basin. In the middle of this there are four winged cupids supporting the final basin, surmounted by a cherub holding a cornucopia from which it pours a stream of water.