The Historic Fountains of Trieste: Maria Theresa's Aqueduct and Mazzoleni's Masterpieces

Anyone crossing Piazza Unità d'Italia today, pausing in front of the Fountain of the Four Continents, sees only the final act of a much longer story. The historic fountains of Trieste were not born as ornaments: they were the lifeline of a city that, in the mid-eighteenth century, was growing at a breathtaking pace and literally had no water to drink. Behind the white stone of the three fountains by Giovanni Battista Mazzoleni lies the story of an aqueduct wanted by an empress, of fish taxes, of carved continents — and of a little putto that the market women dressed in mourning.

A thirsty city: Trieste before the aqueduct

Trieste had known the comfort of running water in Roman times, when three aqueducts — the most important coming from the Rosandra valley — served the ancient Tergeste. That system died in the sixth century: tradition attributes its destruction to the Lombard invasions. For more than a thousand years the city survived on wells and rain cisterns, a fragile network that sufficed only because the population remained small.

Everything changed at the start of the eighteenth century. In 1719 Charles VI granted Trieste the status of free port, and the small walled town began to transform into the emporium of the Habsburg monarchy. With the population growing, the water supply became dramatically insufficient. The emperor ordered the construction of a new aqueduct in 1732, but the order remained on paper: it would take the energy of his daughter to turn it into stone and water.

The Theresian aqueduct, mother of the historic fountains of Trieste

In 1749 Maria Theresa of Austria decreed the start of the works, entrusting them to the engineer De Bonomo, a Trieste patrician, who partly reused the route of the old Roman aqueduct of San Giovanni. The financing was ingeniously pragmatic, drawing on three customs duties:

• the duty on fish
• the dazio del nocchiero, levied on goods loaded and unloaded from ships
• the duty on oil

In the valley of San Giovanni, in the Guardiella area at about 97 metres above sea level, galleries totalling 235 metres were dug into the sandstone to capture the springs. The water was filtered through gravel basins in the so-called Capofonte, a stone structure still visible today in via delle Cave. From there it descended towards the Rotonda del Boschetto, along via Pindemonte and the future Viale XX Settembre — then called contrada dell'Acquedotto — to reach the city centre.

The aqueduct was completed in 1751, in barely two or three years of work. A baroque plaque on the Capofonte celebrates, in Latin, the water "once brought by the Romans, now restored to the city" under the auspices of Maria Theresa and Francis. Its terminals were to be three public fountains, in the three main squares of the growing city.

Giovanni Battista Mazzoleni, the sculptor of the fountains

The three fountains were commissioned from Giovanni Battista Mazzoleni, a sculptor born in Zogno, near Bergamo, on 22 October 1699. Mazzoleni lived in Trieste for about eighteen years, from 1750 to 1768, and for the execution he chose three skilled stonecutters — scalpellini di fino — Giovanni Venturini, Giuseppe Grassi and Giambattista Pozzo. While the state had paid for the aqueduct, the fountains were in principle the municipality's burden; the city, overwhelmed with expenses, managed to have two of the three charged to the aqueduct budget, paying directly only for the most ambitious one.

The Fountain of the Four Continents: the world in Piazza Grande

Created between 1751 and 1754 in the then Piazza Grande, the Fountain of the Four Continents was conceived as a manifesto. It was meant to present Trieste to the world as a city favoured by Fortune thanks to the free port and the policies of Charles VI and Maria Theresa. The four allegorical statues at the corners represent the continents known at the time — Oceania had not yet been discovered:

• Europe with the horse
• Asia with the camel
• Africa with the lion
• America with a crocodile (or iguana, as some readings suggest)

Allegories of the great rivers pour water from their urns into shells, dolphins spout below, and at the top the winged Fame hovers over the young figure of Trieste, reclining on Karst rocks among bales of cotton, barrels and ropes, speaking with a merchant in oriental dress: a perfect synthesis of the city's mercantile vocation.

The fountain soon collected anecdotes. On 30 July 1769, for the inauguration of the new Lazzaretto of Santa Teresa, white and red wine flowed from it instead of water. A fig tree grew among its stones and became so beloved that, when it was removed in 1891, local poets wrote indignant tercets for the "lost friend".

The darkest chapter came in 1938: between 28 August and 2 September the fountain was completely dismantled to make room for the platform from which Benito Mussolini, visiting Trieste, proclaimed the racial laws. The pieces were stored in the Lapidary Garden of the civic museums. Only in 1970, thanks to the painter Cesare Sofianopulo, did the fountain return to the square — off-centre — and start flowing again on 4 June of that year. With the redesign of Piazza Unità in 2000 it finally returned to its original position, aligned with the Town Hall. Vandalism has not spared it: the statue of Africa was decapitated in 2008 and the Fame was damaged in 2015.

The Neptune of Piazza della Borsa, a travelling monument

The second fountain depicts Neptune, god of the sea, standing on a shell with his trident, flanked by three horses from whose mouths the water flowed. The traditional date is 1752, although the construction contract drawn up by the engineer Giovanni Corrado de Gerhard dates from March 1755 — the sources diverge, a sign of a commission that dragged on. It was placed in the then Piazza della Dogana, today Piazza della Borsa, an area that still opened onto the sea through the Canal Piccolo.

The Neptune is Trieste's great travelling monument. Still used by local women to wash clothes in 1887, it was removed with flimsy justifications on 9 June 1920 and locked away in municipal warehouses. Thirty-one years later the sculptor Nino Spagnoli restored it — reconstructing several parts — and in 1951 it was placed in Piazza Venezia, with an epigraph by Baccio Ziliotto summarising its wanderings. Only the redevelopment designed after the 1999 competition won by Bernard Huet, Gaetano Ceschia and Federico Mentil brought it home: since 2010 the god of the sea has once again watched over Piazza della Borsa.

The Giovanin del Ponterosso and its market women

The third fountain, from 1753, rose in the heart of the emerging Borgo Teresiano, in Piazza Ponterosso, then the city's market square — so much so that in 1764 the square was initially called Piazza delle due Fontane, after a twin fountain that was never built. The water gushes from three large masks, descends over shells supported by telamons and finally reaches the great basin.

The statue of the putto crowning it is not by Mazzoleni: it was carved in 1761 by Giovanni Carlo Wagner. The fruit and flower sellers of the market — the venderigole — affectionately renamed it Giovanin, because the water came from the spring of San Giovanni. On St John's day they covered the fountain with flowers, and when King Umberto I was assassinated in 1900 they dressed the putto in black mourning drapes: few monuments in Trieste have been loved so domestically.

The legacy of the historic fountains of Trieste

The Theresian aqueduct, designed for a town, soon proved insufficient for a booming city. In 1855 the company for the Aurisina aqueduct was founded, and its waters reached Trieste between 1858 and 1859 along the railway line. Polluted and downgraded after the First World War, the old aqueduct was finally abandoned after two centuries of service.

The fountains, however, remained. No longer water dispensers — only a few palaces, such as Carciotti or the Locanda Grande, ever had private connections — they survive as the most authentic witnesses of Trieste's golden century: the ingenuity of an empress, the chisel of a Bergamasque sculptor and the affection of a city that still calls a marble putto by its first name.