Description
The Amenano Fountain is the white marble fountain on the south side of Piazza del Duomo in Catania, facing the Palazzo degli Elefanti and next to the Palazzo del Seminario dei Chierici. It is the spot where you can see the river that flows hidden beneath the city, and right behind it the fish market begins.
Carved in Carrara marble in 1867 by the Neapolitan sculptor Tito Angelini, it portrays the river as a young man with a cornucopia. Water pours from the horn into a basin with a rounded rim and then spills over all around it, in a continuous veil that looks like a sheet hung out to dry.
That is why the people of Catania call it "acqua a linzolu", sheet water. From the basin the water falls back into the real river, which runs about two meters below the level of the square and flows into the sea not far away, near the port.
Behind the fountain, a lava stone staircase leads down to the Pescheria, the city's old market: in a few steps you go from the white marble of the square to the fish stalls.
To the Greeks the Amenano was sacred, like every river: some Greek coins from the 5th century BC show the god Amenanos as a bull with a human face, others as the head of a young man.
The Arab geographer al-Idrisi described it as a fickle river: some years it swelled enough to turn the mills, other years it dried up until there was not a drop to drink. In the Middle Ages it was also called Judicello, because it ran through the giudecca, the Jewish quarter.
It once flowed in the open, split into several branches. The 1669 eruption of Etna buried the lake of Nicito and the channels at its mouth, and since the mid-19th century the river has run entirely underground.
In the 19th century the naturalist Carlo Gemmellaro reconstructed its course: one of its branches ran down toward the Roman theater and Piazza del Duomo, another toward the Pescheria. Excavations have found it in several places around the city, with a flow of more than a dozen liters per second.
Carved in Carrara marble in 1867 by the Neapolitan sculptor Tito Angelini, it portrays the river as a young man with a cornucopia. Water pours from the horn into a basin with a rounded rim and then spills over all around it, in a continuous veil that looks like a sheet hung out to dry.
That is why the people of Catania call it "acqua a linzolu", sheet water. From the basin the water falls back into the real river, which runs about two meters below the level of the square and flows into the sea not far away, near the port.
Behind the fountain, a lava stone staircase leads down to the Pescheria, the city's old market: in a few steps you go from the white marble of the square to the fish stalls.
To the Greeks the Amenano was sacred, like every river: some Greek coins from the 5th century BC show the god Amenanos as a bull with a human face, others as the head of a young man.
The Arab geographer al-Idrisi described it as a fickle river: some years it swelled enough to turn the mills, other years it dried up until there was not a drop to drink. In the Middle Ages it was also called Judicello, because it ran through the giudecca, the Jewish quarter.
It once flowed in the open, split into several branches. The 1669 eruption of Etna buried the lake of Nicito and the channels at its mouth, and since the mid-19th century the river has run entirely underground.
In the 19th century the naturalist Carlo Gemmellaro reconstructed its course: one of its branches ran down toward the Roman theater and Piazza del Duomo, another toward the Pescheria. Excavations have found it in several places around the city, with a flow of more than a dozen liters per second.