Naples - Fontana dell’Immacoletella

Fontana dell’Immacoletella and Vesuvius. It don't half loom do it?

A thirteen minute walk from San  Fransisco di Paolo is the Castel dell’Ovo (yes the Egg Castle, I’ll explain later). There are a number of interesting things along the way. Including magnificent views of Vesuvius and the Tyrrhenian Sea.  Heading southeast on Via Console Cesanio until you reach the bay you can walk along the bay (past cats feasting on discarded fish) in a southwesterly direction to a semi-circular piazza with a statue of Umberto I commemorating his visit to the city after an outbreak of cholera or plague or a plague of cholera, or was it typhoid? I know that supposedly the Corso Umberto I was built in the 1880’s as a wide street to separate the lower area with the docks (and therefore the disease) and the upper areas of the city. Any bloody excuse for a city improvement project eh? These days it would be a motor bypass right through Stonehenge. Well that was off topic.

About halfway between to the Castel dell'Ovo, at a sharp turn of the esplanade, is the Fontana dell’Immacoletella:  A striking fountain, delightfully whimsical and by Pietro Bernini, the father of the stone whittler that inflicted so much baroque-ness on Rome. Will we ever escape from the omnipresent Bernini’s?According to the guidebook I bought while I was there and a couple of websites, like many of Naples older fountains this one has been moved about a bit. 

It's current location is divine. 

Below is the unn-named piazza with the statue of Umberto I. My back is to the bay of Naples in this picture. Well to be precise my back is to a series of food vans on an excedra that juts out into the bay from teh esplanade, but that seemed like a lot of words just for accuracy.