This is the marble derriere of Neptune, the Roman god of the sea. When this fountain was created by Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli in 1557, the deity surprisingly faced the city and not the harbor. After being severely damaged, it was recreated in 1934 and rotated 180 degrees. At the base of the Neptune Fountain are two female sea monsters. They represent navigation threats in the Strait of Messina that caused countless shipwrecks. Scylla was a rocky cliff and Charybdis was a giant whirlpool. This mythological story created a Greek idiom that translates to “between a rock and a hard place.”
