Beautiful high quality image of Piazza Esedra (now Piazza della Repubblica) during the preparations for the arrival of Edward VII on a visit to Rome. At the center of the fountain the “man with the fish in his hand” is missing, the famous stornello of Sor Capanna will be added only in 1912 :
There is a funtanone in Piazza delle Termethat a famous sculptor has decoratedwith four naked women with sheepand a man in the middle who acts as a husband.How beautiful quer giantthere among all of them:cor fish in handwater everyone’s backside.
From the Facebook page
Lucia : “I remember the summer evenings we went to listen to music in an outdoor bar what nostalgia what romance”
Marinella : “How beautiful Rome was at the beginning of the twentieth century…beautiful photo thanks for making us relive a Rome that no longer exists…”
Renato : “I remember the Grand Italia café with the little orchestra outside on summer evenings (where there was McDonald’s)”
Fountain of the Naiads
The work of the Palermitan sculptor Mario Rutelli , completed and inaugurated in 1901, consisted of four bronze nude female figures (arranged in place of the lions in the appropriate protruding basins), depicting naiads : the Nymph of the Lakes, recognizable by the swan she holds with her , the Nymph of the Rivers, lying on a water monster, the Nymph of the Underground Waters, lying on a dragon, and the Nymph of the Oceans, riding a horse, symbol of the sea. A large jet fell on the statues coming from the first internal basin, while the central basin maintained the design of the original fountain, with a large number of jets directed inwards, in addition to the five central ones. The whole complex was surrounded by a gate .
The particularly sensual and lascivious position of the statues, and the sheen of the provocative bodies bathed in water, turned out to be an immoral and indecent spectacle for the conservative wing of the papal faith which was still alive in the city, and of which L’ Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper; although initially a wooden fence was maintained to block the view of the monument (waiting for the Municipality to take a position on the protests), the comings and goings of young people who stopped around the gate to admire the statues between the disconnected tables only exacerbated the sense of scandal that the fountain aroused. The controversies grew, in the name of modesty and respectability , and persisted for a while, but the Municipality embraced the progressive theses and, in addition to not removing the Naiads, as the more puritan current would have wanted, on February 10, 1901 it let the Romans, following a half-popular uprising, pulled down the fence. (wiki)
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