Webcam Town Hall Square Assisi
Town Hall Square Assisi
Located in the place where the ancient Roman Forum stood, dominated by the imposing Rocca Maggiore, the rectangular square begins at the end of Corso Mazzini which connects it to the Basilica of Santa Chiara. Immediately on the right you can admire the sixteenth-century “fountain of the three lions”, revisited in 1762 by Giovanni Martinucci.
opened in center of gravity of medieval Assisi, at the meeting of the arteries coming from the city gates (Cappuccini, Moiano, Nuova, Perlici, San Francesco, San Giacomo, San Pietro), we have documented news from the beginning of the XNUMXth century, as a privileged venue for popular gatherings (stalls markets or populi). Still lacking in public buildings, the evocative tower-houses of the feudal aristocracy rose there, later replaced, with the anti-imperial struggles, by the mercantile bourgeoisie.
The site will be ennobled in 1212, when the consuls managed to obtain from the monks of San Benedetto al Subasio the authorization to establish the municipal seat in the temple of Minerva, then called casalino of San Donato, giving rise, with this choice, to a symbolic continuity between the Roman city and the municipal one.
In 1228 the square was enlarged to the east taking on the current surface and eloquently entitled platea nova or magna comunis. Between 1282 and 1305 the Roman temple was flanked by the Torre del Popolo and the Palazzo del Capitano: on the southern side the building of the Priori building, still the seat of the Assisi town hall, began. On the north-western side, in the twenties of the twentieth century, the construction of the post office building was carried out.
In the so-called pint time of the Palazzo dei Priori, frescoed with grotesques, the public was accessed through a small door pleasure house Assisi, since 1500 used as a place for the trading of cereals. Also in the municipal building, later also home to an art gallery, the future San Gabriele dell'Addolorata was born on March 1838, XNUMX, son of Sante Possenti, pontifical governor of the city: he received baptism in the cathedral of San Rufino, like St. Francis and Frederick II of Swabia.
To remember, in addition to the important monuments mentioned, the Zubboli bookshop-typography (present since 1870) and the historic Bar Minerva, dear to all the inhabitants of Assisi who, in the square, celebrate the Calendimaggio every year with events and parades of medieval costumes, recalling the ancient disputes between the Fiumi and Nepis families.