The monumental “Fontana d’Italia” has miraculously survived the German attacks that wiped out Gessopalena in December 1943. It is located at the centre of Piazza Roma, the heart of social and religious life of the village in the Carricine Lands. It has the shape of a sea shell and was created more than one hundred years ago, in 1920, by Carlo Fontana, the same sculptor from Carrara of the well-known bronze “Quadriga dell'Unità” at the Altare della Patria in Rome – upon request of Gabriele D’Annunzio and of the painter Francesco Paolo Michetti, and also thanks to a dense network of family relations and famous aristocratic men from Abruzzo, like the baron Mosè Ricci and the Member of Parliament Pasquale Masciantonio, who was the owner of the Castle of Casoli at that time.

The monumental fountain has been funded by those who migrated from Gessopalena to America in the middle of XIX century “in need for bread”. Homesick, they gave their resources to “enhance the beauty and the splendour of the square with a magnificent work of art”. The generosity of the emigrants and the gratitude towards them shall be forever remembered by a plaque at the centre of the harmoniously gushing fountain: “HUNC FONTEM AMERICA PEREGRINANTES PATRIAE OBTULERUNT – MCMXX”.

At the centre of the basin, shell-shaped like the one painted by Botticelli in his “Birth of Venus”, there is a noble goddess of Victory, the Greek Nike, with her fiery and fair face, rising on the rostrum of a ship with one hand on the plough-shaped wheel to guide the ship towards the domination of the world, and the other holding high an olive tree twig. All the symbols have been inspired to Carlo Fontana by the lines of D’Annunzio which are cut on the bow: “Sacra alla novella aurora / con l’aratro e la prora” (=sacred to the new dawn / with the plough and the bow).

Michetti defined the Fontana d’Italia as “beautiful and unexpected in Gessopalena”. It turns Piazza Roma into an amphitheatre with trees and surrounded by the after-war houses of the new centre, which was once the periphery. The parish church of Santa Maria dei Raccomandati and the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore are located on the same square, like a crown to the fountain.

[Credits | Text: Ottavio Di Renzo De Laurentis | Translation: Mirella Rapa | Voice and music: Studio Qreate | Photo: Camillo Talone]