Palazzo di Giustizia

In the bright and beautiful piazza Giovanni Verga is the grandiose building of the Law Courts, established between 1936 and 1953. The leading idea can immediately be read in the façade with its light forefront of tall thin pillars; balance and formal rigour dominate the building. Writes Antonio Rocca (L’Arte del Ventennio a Catania, 1988): “At the entrance, just behind the pillars, in front of the large volume of the ‘cell’ the simulacrum of the Goddess (a sculpture by the artist M.M. Lazzaro) has left its usual dwelling and come out into the open, at the entrance a vigilant custodian of the sacred place. Above its crown runs the frieze sculptured by Alfredo Russo narrating the milestone in the history of Justice, up until that of the fascist era”.


The great statue was erected in 1955: “Following a long season of controversies – can be read in the Municipal Magazine – the bronze statue of Justice has been removed from the courtyard of the Civil Engineering Building and transported to piazza Giovanni Verga. The statue represents a woman figure, seven and a half meters tall, supporting two men on the palms of her hands in order to assess their guilt or their innocence.The whole is fused in bronze, weighing around five tons. The artist drew his inspiration from a painting by Giotto in the Cappella degli Scrovegni, and portrayed the figure standing with a rich pleated robe in order to harmonize with the project by the architect Fichera, who definitely envisaged her in a vertical position and in a rhythmical composition with the pillars of the façade”.

Here are the relevant data of the Law Courts: front 100 meters long, height 18 meters, 350 rooms the most noteworthy being the huge lobby which every year hosts the solemn opening ceremony of the judiciary year.

Giovanni Verga square

Palazzo di Giustizia 2

The actual piazza Verga, was originally destined to military training and was called piazza d’Armi. It kept this name until 1907 when it was the site of an important agricultural exhibition, and from that time on it bore the name of piazza Esposizione, in memory of that fortunate event.

The square was then gradually surrounded by edifices, one of the first being the Carabinieri Barracks on a plan by the engineer Clarenza.


The Malavoglia fountain

Today piazza Verga is one of the most luminous and beautiful squares in modern Catania. In front of the hotel Excelsior is the very beautiful Malavoglia fountain. It is the work of the sculptor Carmelo Mendola (1895-19769 and was inaugurated in 1975. The sculpture represents the scene of the dramatic shipwreck of the ‘Providenza’, described in Verga’s novel I Malavoglia: in the night “black like lavastone… you could hear the wind hissing in the sail of the Provvidenza and the rope playing like a guitar string. Suddenly the wind started whistling like a railway engine, as it comes out of the hole in the mountain, over Trezza, and a wave arrived without them seeing where it came from and made the Provvidenza creak like a sack of walnuts, throwing it into the air”.


Bibliography
AA.VV., Enciclopedia di Catania, Catania 1987.
Guida di Catania e provincia, a c. di N. Recupero, Catania 1991.