One of the most interesting and iconic statues (photo, right) in the city of Naples is the Fountain of Spina Corona. It is a marble representation of an angelically winged siren, Parthenope, the eponym of the original city, above Vesuvius. She is pressing her breasts to direct the streams of water/milk onto the flames of the volcano to extinguish them. The work bears the Latin inscription Dum Vesevi Syrena Incendia Mulcet [While the siren of Vesuvius calms the flames]. That may be a pun in Latin since the Latin infinitive mulcere—besides meaning to calm or caress—can also mean to soften, as in to make metal soft, and Mulciber is, in fact, one of the nicknames of Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge, guardian of fire, and source of the word volcano. So she is 'mulceting' the 'mulciter'. That's funny. So is the fact that she seems to have the legs of a chicken; I don't know why, but I'm sure it's complicated.

Some sources say, simply, that the statue was done at the behest of Spanish Viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo around 1550, and some from the 1600s even claimed that the siren putting out the flames of the volcano was intended to represent the way Toledo had extinguished the fires of potential revolution. Be that as it may, there are references to the statue from the 1400s, so it couldn't have been Toledo's idea, no matter what people wanted to read into it later on. Most opinion is that it is from the Aragonese period in the 1400s and the Spanish effort around 1550 was a remake. That remake was overseen by Giovanni da Nola (1488-1558), one of the great names of the Italian Renaissance. He worked principally in Naples. His altars, sepulchers, and monuments are found in many of the great churches in Naples; he also built a number of the city's monument fountains from the 1500s.

The fountain has recently been restored and is located outside the church of Santa Caterina della Spina Corona, not far from the Fredrick II university in what used to be the Portanova section of the city. The church, itself, goes back to 1354 when it was built as an annex to a Benedictine monastery and, in its long history, has even been a synagogue. The original statue of winged Parthenope is in the National Museum. The restored fountain uses an exact replica by Achille d'Orso, the prominent Neapolitan sculptor from the early 1900s. In popular and not totally unexpected vulgar parlance, the work is also referred to locally as la fontana delle zizze (The Fountain of the Tits).

Finally, the current period of calm on Vesuvius—no visible activity since 1944 (although "events" such as rumblings and movement are detected by instruments)—has been the longest in centuries. Maybe the restoration of the statue is working.