As a gateway to the central Piazza Maggiore and a work of singular beauty and elegance, the Neptune Fountain is one of Bologna?s most prized artistic gems, recognized by all but understood by very few. Richard Tuttle?s monograph represents the first comprehensive study of this iconic monument, executed between 1563 and 1567 by the Flemish artist Giambologna and the Sicilian architect Tomaso Laureti, that considers all of the complex aspects of its commission, planning, execution, iconography, and urban impact. Working with an extraordinary body of documentary and visual materials, Richard Tuttle (1941-2009)?one of the world?s foremost authorities on Renaissance Bologna?reveals how the fountain was created collaboratively by papal administrators and artists, how it depended on contemporary hydraulic technology, communicated political messages, and became an instrument of urban renewal. The book?s broad appeal, scholarly rigor, and eloquent writing promise to make it an indispensable source on Italian sixteenth-century sculpture, architecture and urban planning, as well as a definitive text on this remarkable Renaissance fountain. Richard J. Tuttle (1941?2009) taught Renaissance architectural history at Tulane University for thirty years (1977?2007), before moving to the University of Bologna?s Department of Architecture and Urban Planning in 2007. He was the author of numerous groundbreaking and award-winning studies on Renaissance architecture, sculpture, and urbanism, and was the world authority on sixteenth-century Bologna and the architect and theorist Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola. Nadja Aksamija is Associate Professor of Art History at Wesleyan University. Her published and forthcoming books and articles have examined, among others, sixteenth-century villas and castles in Bologna and Dubrovnik, notions of sacred landscape in Counter- Reformation painting and emblematics, and the restoration of Renaissance architectural monuments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the recipient of prestigious grants and fellowships from the Getty Foundation, the Kress Foundation, and the Villa I Tatti in Florence, among others. Francesco Ceccarelli is Associate Professor of Architectural History at the University of Bologna. The focus of his research is the early modern and modern Italian city, from the Renaissance through Neoclassicism. He is the recipient of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei?s prestigious prize in History and History of Geography (2000) for his innovative research on the strategies of urban development in the Po valley during the Renaissance.