The Fountain of Shame

There was a fountain in Florence, many years ago, that amazed everyone who saw it.  Fonte stupendissima, Giorgio Vasari called it – “A most stupendous fountain that has no equal in Florence and perhaps in Italy”.  It was in the garden of a Spanish nobleman named Don Luigi de Toledo. 

The fountain’s stepped perimeter, made of white marble, was a circle 120 feet in diameter; Don Luigi’s guests could stroll along a wide promenade, edged with a balustrade, and admire the sculptured river deities beside basins shimmering with clear water.  Or they could cross gently inclined walkways over a moat-like pool, past statues of Olympian gods.  There were plenty of muscular marble Tritons to flirt with the shapely Nereids adorning the fountain, while fanciful carved animal heads in niches – elephants, crocodiles, even a unicorn, gravely spouted water into the moat.  High above, in the center, three small basins overflowed into each other in a sparkling cascade.  

Don Luigi’s garden occupied a large plot of land he purchased from the nuns of a Dominican convent. It was part of the convent’s orchard, in northern Florence, near the Giardino dei Semplici, which in those days, the mid-16th century, belonged to Cosimo I de Medici, Duke of Florence.  Today, the Duke’s giardino has become Florence’s Botanical Garden, and Don Luigi’s property is now the Giardino di San Clemente.  You can go and visit both gardens, but the fonte stupendissima will not be there.  It’s gone without a trace, all but forgotten in Florence.  I never knew it had existed, until I visited a very different (and sunnier) city.

Palermo, in Sicily, is about 1200 kilometers south, by road and a ferry across the Strait of Messina, from Florence. Palermo has many treasures:  the largest opera house in Italy, two great cathedrals, a famous royal chapel rich with mosaics, strange mummies in the Catacombs of the Capuchins, and a culture that has survived many conquerors. But fountains?

Well, Palermo has fountains, of course; but the only one I’d heard of before visiting the city was something called the Fontana di Vergogna, the “Fountain of Shame”, which was to be found in the piazza in front of Palermo’s city hall.  The name was intriguing, of course, but it was several days before I found myself at the Quattro Canti, the “four corners” where the two main streets of Palermo meet.  The intersection is famous for the decorated concave facades of the corner palaces, but just down the street at Piazza Pretorio was the city hall, so I decided to visit.  And there, in the piazza, behind a black, gated metal fence, I saw an enormous circular fountain, gleaming in white marble. 

Giant carved figures of river gods lay basking in the spray from three brimming basins in the center, whose overflow filled the fountain’s lower pools. There were fanciful animal heads in niches around a lower, moat-like pool.  A gate in the black fence was open, and I spent an hour or so wandering among the statuary, where lots of marble Tritons shared sidelong glances with a bevy of shapely Nereids and gods like Bacchus and Diana looked on with stony disdain.

Since the figures adorning the fountain were nearly all naked, I thought I knew why it was called the Fountain of Shame.  But, just to make sure, I did some research; and it was then I found that the Fontana Pretoria (to give it its proper name) had actually been created in Florence, for Don Luigi’s garden, by a sculptor named Francesco Camilliani, in 1554!  But how could an immense marble fountain, created by a Florentine sculptor, have somehow been magically transported from central Italy to Sicily? And why?

The answer, I found, lay in the character of Don Luigi de Toledo and his family, and the local politics of Palermo while Sicily was under Spanish rule.

Don Luigi‘s father was Don Pedro de Toledo, former Viceroy of Naples; his older brother Don Garcia de Toledo was Viceroy of Sicily for several years; and his sister, Eleanora, was married to Cosimo I de Medici, Duke of Florence.  It was fortunate for Don Luigi that he had influential relatives, because he was a bit of a spendthrift.  Eleanora was older than Luigi and tended to spoil her little brother, even in adulthood, and his debts apparently were often paid from the Ducal treasury.  But when Eleanora died in 1562, and his appetite for lavish living continued, he sank deeper into debt, and finally had to leave Florence for Naples and a reduced lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the Senate of Palermo had commissioned a modest fountain for the piazza in front of their chambers; however, the project foundered in a dispute with the sculptor.  Don Garcia, mindful of his brother’s difficulties, and recalling that there was a valuable fountain sitting dry in Florence, made the Senate an offer they couldn’t refuse.  They were, no doubt, taken aback by the price (20,000 scudi, an enormous sum, plus the cost of re-assembling the structure), but consoled themselves with the thought that the goodwill of the former Viceroy was priceless – surely worth a bit of public outcry when they imposed a hefty tax on wine to pay the bill.

So the fonte stupendissima was dismantled, and shipped to Palermo in 644 pieces.  It took nine years to install it.  It is rather splendid, in truth, and has become an object of pride for the city – but the citizens who cried “shame, shame” as the fountain took shape may have had more in mind than naked gods and goddesses.

Text © 2019 by Joe Gartman; Photographs © 2019 by Patricia Gartman. First published in Italia! Magazine, October 2019