Piazza del Popolo is the nerve centre of Fontecchio and at one time it must have looked like a living space, with the market stalls and the coming and going of people from all over the peninsula. The round arches in the perimeter buildings remain, some of which have been filled in, and still remind us of the commercial use of this area. The oven has been the same for centuries, put back into operation for special occasions. In the middle there is a statue of a soldier from the Second World War, indicating the point from which the enemy arrived.
In the lower part there is a much smaller square, with a stone seat that runs along almost the entire perimeter. It preserves two of Fontecchio’s symbols: the 14th-century fountain and the fresco of the Madonna and Child.The 14th-century fountain in Piazza del Popolo in Fontecchio is considered one of the most beautiful of its kind in central Italy. It was a daily destination for women who – until the 1960s – drew water from here to take to the houses of the town with their typical copper conches. Made of white limestone, typical of the Abruzzo mountains, it is of very fine artistic workmanship.
The fountain is raised above the slightly inclined plane of the square’s pavement, by means of a circular basement that raises the monument upwards, giving it a certain solemnity. The basin is polygonal in shape, with the corners characterized by smooth, elegant and well-proportioned small columns, inserted in a double frame of equal size and symmetrical architectural features, which have both a structural function in making the object solid and an aesthetic one.
At the centre of the bottom of the pool rises a cylindrical column, also made of stone, which emerges from the body of water. The aerial part bears, within a section delimited by two relief frames, four sculpted masks bearing as many spouts. At the top the fountain becomes a truncated cone shape, tapering decisively, detaching itself as far as possible from the aedicule above.
The aedicule rests on a circular bowl intensely decorated with botanical elements that recall the wild artichoke and is surmounted by columns with capitals that support a pyramidal spire, in Gothic style, covered by a sail vault.
A few meters from the fountain, above one side of the trough, there is a niche that houses the beautiful fresco of the Tuscan school with the Madonna on the throne and a child in her arms playing with a goldfinch. Two angels hold up a cloth that wraps the Madonna in her malachite green mantle. On the sides of the aedicule Saint Blaise, patron saint of Fontecchio, Saint Catherine of Alexandria.
