Fonte Pispini - Siena - Tuscany

It is June 23 (a day after many centuries earlier) of 1536 when the "congregatione et contrada della Abbadia Nuova" declares to the municipality that it wants to create a new source that not only responds to the water needs of the neighborhood, but also "can honor the dicta contrada". In fact, they are already presenting a drawing of what, in their intentions, will be "a rare and beautiful fountain", a work that will become a source of pride for the whole city, introducing for the first time in Siena the concept of monumental fountain , not just functional.

To supply the new well, a modest brick supply was carried out several tens of centimeters below street level, also exploiting the water from San Maurizio. The water overflowing from the source of the Abbadia Nuova is attributed to the Monastery of Eternal Life, which since the end of the fifteenth century has housed the Dominican Tertiaries of San Giacinto, while a part flows behind it, to feed the tanks and springs which are placed outside the walls to irrigate the gardens and fields. The new well took eleven years of work and was completed in 1545. The project, which some have not hesitated attributing to Baldassarre Peruzzi, stipulates that the water falls from an upper cup to a lower one through the torches hidden in the mouths of some masks.

Willem Vandenameele