Trevi Fountain

TREVI FOUNTAIN ROME
The Trevi Fountain, in Italian Fontana di Trevi, is the largest and most ambitious of the Baroque fountains of Rome. The Trevi Fountain is eighty five feet high and sixty five feet wide. The Trevi Fountain in Rome is well known for many reasons. One being that it is the fountain that drenched Anita Ekberg in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

The other well known legend is that the fountain is known as the 'Three Coins in the Fountain'. This is because legend has it that it is deemed lucky to throw coins with your right hand over your right shoulder into Rome's Trevi Fountain water. It is said that throwing one coin in the water will ensure that the thrower will return to Rome. It is also said that throwing two coins into the water will ensure that the thrower will fall in love with a beautiful Roman girl or boy. Throwing three coins is then meant to ensure that the thrower will marry that same girl or boy in Rome.

The Trevi Fountain stands at the junction of three roads (tre vie) and marks the terminal point of the Aqua Virgo (in Italian Acqua Vergine), which is one of the ancient aqueducts that supplied water to Rome. It was in 19BC that Roman technicians located a source of pure water only fourteen miles from the city. The Aqua Virgo aqueduct was connected directly to the Baths of Agrippa. They served Rome for more than four hundred years until the Goth besiegers broke the aqueducts. The medieval Romans were then reduced to polluted wells and the dangerous water of the Tiber River, which was also used as a sewer.

In the fifteenth century, with the Renaissance returned the Roman custom of building a handsome fountain at the endpoint of an aqueduct which brought water to Rome. Pope Nicholas V finished mending the Acqua Vergine in 1453 and built a simple basin for the water which was designed by the humanist architect Leon Battista Alberti.

In 1629 Pope Urban VIII wanted the fountain to be more dramatic. He asked Bernini to do some drawings, which he did and he moved the fountain from the other side of the square to face the Quirinal Palace. This was so the Pope could look down and enjoy it. Sadly the Pope died and the project died with him. Bernini's project was torn down for Nicola Salvi's fountain but there were many Bernini touches put in the new fountain as it was built. Salvi actually lost a contest in 1730 that was held by Pope Clement XII for this job but in the end Salvi was given the work anyway. He began work on the fountain in 1732 and was finished in 1762, long after Pope Clement's death.

The taming of the waters is the theme of the gigantic scheme that tumbles forward, mixing water and rock work, and filling the small square. Pietro Bracci's 'Neptune' was set in the central niche. In the niches flanking Neptune, Abundance spills water from her urn and Salubrity holds a cup from which a snake drinks. Tritons and horses provide symmetrical balance and guide Neptune's shell chariot. The backdrop for the fountain is the Palazzo Poli, given a new facade with a giant order of Corinthian pilasters that link the two main stories.

Nicola Salvi died in 1751, with his work only half finished. The Trevi Fountain was finished in 1762 by Giuseppe Pannini, who substituted the present bland allegories for planned sculptures of Agrippa and 'Trivia', the Roman virgin.