Small Onofrio's Fountain

This guide to Small Onofrio's Fountain in Dubrovnik opens with an odd question: why does a five-hundred-year-old fountain have an open police case, filed not over war or earthquake but over a Sunday morning last August. It traces sixty days of careful restoration work undone hours after the fountain reopened, then reaches back to the architect Onofrio della Cava and the Milanese sculptor Pietro di Martino who carved it between fourteen forty and fourteen forty-two. You will hear how the fountain survived shellfire during the nineteen nineties war for independence, and see the dolphins, shells and small round faces worked into its softer, more playful twin down the street.