Sobre este lugar
Place Royale was laid out in the 1780s and 1790s by the architect Mathurin Crucy, after the demolition of the old medieval ramparts, as a calm and uniform neoclassical square. Its centrepiece is the great fountain inaugurated in 1865, a pyramid of granite basins topped by a white marble statue of Nantes personified as a crowned woman holding a trident. Below her, allegorical figures represent the Loire and its tributaries, a sculpted hymn to the rivers on which the city's wealth was built. The square was devastated on the sixteenth of September 1943, when bombing destroyed eight of the nine buildings around it, yet the fountain itself survived almost untouched. Rebuilt faithfully after the war under the architect Michel Roux-Spitz, the square only recovered its full form in 1961.
Datos clave
- 1865 year — The monumental fountain celebrating the city and its rivers was inaugurated
- 1943 year — A September bombing raid devastated the square during the Second World War
- 8 buildings — Of the nine framing the square were destroyed in the raid, yet the fountain survived
📍 Place Royale 6, 44000, Nantes