IL NETTUNO INQUIETO. CELEBRAZIONE DEL POTERE E NECESSITÀ FUNZIONALI NEL LENTO PEREGRINARE DI UNA FONTANA NAPOLETANA

Public fountains have always characterized the city, overcoming every functional aspect to take on the role of street furniture to facilitate the use of urban places usually destined for meeting and socializing. Having finished their original task, the fountains give completeness and organicity to different urban areas, useful for the recovery and improvement of the image of the historic city. In spite of that, when definitively freed from any functional tie, the fountains undergo transformations or transfers especially if their presence is incompatible with the urban changes to which the city is inevitably subject. Specifically in the city of Naples, in a millenary urban fabric very rich in extraordinary architectural value fountains, the question is even more complex because the fountains have rarely survived the urban transformations, and even less are those preserved today in the original places. As in no other ‘ancien regime’ great capital, the Neapolitan fountains have in fact accompanied the growth of the city from the viceregal period to the ‘Risanamento’ at the end of the nineteenth century; in particular, the paper analyses the events of the fountain of Neptune, built at the end of the sixteenth century and subject of an extraordinarily high number of movements and reintegrations in the space of over four centuries. Giuseppe Pignatelli