Piazza Maria Immacolata

Between the two main streets of Taranto's Borgo, Piazza Maria Immacolata is an oval garden with a fountain of intertwined sea creatures, framed by buildings from different periods.

Why it matters

Piazza Maria Immacolata is a rectangular space in Taranto's Borgo, where Via D'Aquino and Via di Palma diverge. Buildings from different periods enclose a planted island with an oval garden.

What to notice

The planted bed has an ovoid shape inside the rectangular frame of palazzi. A fountain stands at its centre, its basin decorated with two intertwined sea creatures.

Context and history

The piazza's name is a replacement, not an origin. The portal records that it was originally dedicated to Giordano Bruno, the philosophical writer posthumously adopted by Italian freethinkers, before being re-titled for the Madonna and repeatedly remodelled into the form visible today. That sequence — a lay dedication traded for a Marian one, the fabric adjusted again and again — tracks the Borgo's own change from building site to established quarter.

The wider quarter grew around the arsenal that King Umberto I inaugurated in 1889, and the two streets the square divides carry that history in their names. Via D'Aquino was once known as Strada del Carmine, after the neighbouring church; from 1892 it was dedicated to Tommaso Nicolò d'Aquino, the eighteenth-century Tarantine poet of the Arcadian academy whose Latin poem the Delicie Tarentinae sang the city's charms. Piazza Maria Immacolata became the point where that promenade met the working road to the Arsenale.