The Fontana Pretoria is the huge marble fountain in Piazza Pretoria, a few steps from the Quattro Canti in the centre of Palermo. It was not made for Palermo at all: it was carved in Florence in the 1550s for a nobleman's garden, then sold to the city, taken apart into 644 pieces and shipped to Sicily. Its crowd of naked gods and nymphs later earned the square the nickname Piazza della Vergogna, the Square of Shame.
Fontana Pretoria at a glance
- Where: Piazza Pretoria, just south of the Quattro Canti, between Palermo's town hall (Palazzo Pretorio) and the church of Santa Caterina.
- Created: begun in 1554 in Florence; reassembled in Palermo from 1574 and completed in 1581.
- By: the Florentine sculptor Francesco Camilliani, a pupil of Baccio Bandinelli; assembled in Palermo by his son Camillo Camilliani with Michelangelo Naccherino.
- What it is today: the centrepiece of the square, surrounded by a railing, restored between 1998 and 2003.
- Time needed: 15–20 minutes to walk all the way round.
From a Florentine garden to a Sicilian square
The fountain was made for the garden of Don Luigi de Toledo in Florence, a Spanish nobleman and brother of Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. Francesco Camilliani began work in 1554 and filled the garden with a fountain of dozens of statues. Giorgio Vasari praised it as unlike anything else in Florence. But Don Luigi fell deep into debt, and in 1573 he sold the whole fountain to the city of Palermo.
It reached Palermo on 26 May 1574, dismantled into 644 pieces. Some statues had been damaged on the way and others never arrived. Several houses were pulled down to make room for it in front of the town hall, and Francesco's son Camillo Camilliani rebuilt it, adapting it to the new site. With the sculptor Michelangelo Naccherino he finished the work in 1581. The square and the town hall took the name Pretoria from the Praetor who once headed the city's government.
What to look for
- The layout: a series of concentric basins with stairs and balustrades, rising towards a central column of stacked bowls.
- The gods and goddesses: figures of the Olympian gods and other mythological characters stand around the fountain, most of them naked.
- The river figures, which represent the rivers of Palermo, and the ring of animal heads that once spouted water into the basins.
- The damage: missing noses and fingers, some reattached, and the figure of Diana, still without a head since thieves stole it, along with Venus's, in 1975.
- The 19th-century railing by Giovanni Battista Filippo Basile, and the eagles on the façade of the town hall behind, which give it its nickname, Palazzo delle Aquile.
Noses, Messina and the Square of Shame
The nickname Piazza della Vergogna is usually explained in two ways: the statues' nudity, which shocked many people in a square full of churches and convents, and a joke from the 18th and 19th centuries that the naked figures were a fair picture of a city government with nothing to hide behind. The statues' broken noses have their own legend, recorded by the folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè: people from Messina are said to have cut them off in the 17th century, in revenge for Palermitans breaking the fingers of Neptune on Messina's fountain. Treat it as a story, not history.
Tips for your visit
- Come in the morning, when the light falls on the white marble and the square is still quiet.
- Walk right round the railing: each side shows different figures, and the view towards Santa Caterina's dome is the best for photos.
- Step into the former convent of Santa Caterina next door, whose pastry shop sells sweets made from the nuns' old recipes.
Nearby
- Quattro Canti: the early 17th-century baroque crossroads of Via Maqueda and Via Vittorio Emanuele, with four curved façades decorated with fountains, the seasons, Spanish kings and the city's patron saints.
- Church of Santa Caterina: the baroque church on the square, with an interior covered in coloured marble inlays.
- La Martorana and San Cataldo: two Arab-Norman churches on Piazza Bellini, just behind the fountain, one full of Byzantine mosaics, the other with three red domes.
- Palermo Cathedral: the great cathedral on Via Vittorio Emanuele, a short walk west, mixing Norman, Gothic and later styles.
See Palermo with World City Trail
Our Palermo scavenger hunt turns the old town into a game you play on your phone. The route links 10 stops and takes around 2 hours, with about 34 minutes of walking. It includes the Norman Palace with the Palatine Chapel and Palermo Cathedral, both on Via Vittorio Emanuele west of the Quattro Canti.
If you prefer a different format, there is also a self-guided walking tour and an outdoor escape game in Palermo.
Play the Palermo scavenger hunt →
Take the self-guided walking tour of Palermo →
Play the outdoor escape game in Palermo →
Facts checked in October 2026.