Pretoria Square is one of the most beautiful squares in Palermo, located in the heart of the ancient city. The Square is also known as Piazza della Vergogna (Shame Square) and it hosts a beautiful fountain that fills its core and several buildings all arranged around it, including the town hall, called Palazzo delle Aquile and one of the side walls of the Saint Caterina splendid church.

The square can be accessed not only from the side entrances of Corso Vittorio Emanuele and the adjacent Bellini Square, but also from the main widening of Via Maqueda, from which it is possible to admire a perfect angle of one of the most suggestive points of the entire city.

For those unfamiliar with Palermo, it is appropriate to clarify how much the square is in a central position and how much it is actually immersed in one of the oldest parts of the city.

 

The historic center of Palermo is made up of two long streets, precisely Via Maqueda and Corso Vittorio Emanuele, which intersect in the so-called Piazza dei Quattro Canti and which, with their meeting, give life to a splendid city design able to mute even the most usual passenger, for its beauty and grandeur. From the meeting of these two avenues an often narrow and inticate branching of streets and alleys is born, which make the historic center of Palermo a wonderful place to get lost. Like a drop of watercolor that rests on a canvas and expands when the painter is distracted and does not change its path on time, those roads encounter in the same way creating a persuasive motive. And gladly any walkers would not oppose resistance to his legs, commanded by shining eyes and by a beating heart for the beam of astonishment in which they run into. A wonder made of the yellow that dominates the neighborhood, a bright yellow or almost faded when illuminating the decadent buildings that populate those streets; a wonder made by the static nature of the buildings whose shape does not seem to be affected by any restoration and which not vent you, because it is an elegant decadence, an antiquity that scratches your heart and silently fills you; a wonder made by the writing on the walls and by the streets' names in all languages, by the alleys that surprise you with improvised temples, by corners that hide apartments with very high roofs, or white marble or worked wood churches; a wonder made by the odour of the bazaar that grouts the area and makes you immediately feel part of this environment, even if you have only passed there for the first time.

That is what is for me the historical center of Palermo and Pretoria square perfectly fits into this engaging framework.

 

Whenever it happen I quickly pass by the road that runs along it, I have to observe at least for a moment, that wondrous white marble fountain, whose statues seem to recall you in their immobility, as if they were singing sirens.

And you, not bringing with you any wax to suffocate their song, inevitably approach the sculptures but the surprise that they reserve for you is not a trap and turns into details admiration.

And so you stop to look at the fountain, characterized by two levels that can be accessed from the white steps and that seems to want to be pridely admired without any care of the nickname that was given to it. The fountain is in fact called "shame" (and that gives the name to the square) not only for the nudity of the statues that populate it but also because in the time of its installation in Palermo it was considered a symbol of corruption and malpractice (the fountain was in fact built in Florence and transferred in Palermo at the end of 1500). Subsequently, the Palermo transposition has transformed some of the fountain's constitutive elements into real typical characters of the new environment: for example, in its lower part the water courses of Palermo* would be represented: Oreto, Papireto, Maredolce and Gabriele.

 

To complete the idyllic scene of the square, a contribution is given by the buildings that embrace the fountain, such as the already mentioned Palazzo delle Aquile and the church of Saint Caterina, then Palazzo Bonocore, now a museum and Palazzo Chiaramonte Bordonaro, unfortunately not accessible and perfect witness of a decadence that characterizes some of the historical buildings of Palermo.

This mixture of styles and in particular those that can be found in the historic center, reminds me how unique the city of Palermo is in its great contradiction: "timeless beauty" against "habit", which can sometimes turn into carelessness and abandonment.

A contradiction with which the Palermitans silently coexist and which leads them to become sad, considering the priceless value of certain places but, at the same time, leads them to love this abandonment, almost like a spell fallen from the sky of the city.