What accounts for the fame of the Trevi Fountain? Since its appearance in Fellini’s 1959 film “La Dolce Vita”, when Anita Ekberg plunged so seductively into the fountain, the Trevi has been Rome’s most iconic image. Today the site is on every tourist’s must see list and is usually packed with visitors who throw coins into its crystal blue waters in order to insure their return to the Eternal City.
Yet visitors exuberantly enacting their own version of la dolce vita - carefully posing for cameras while tossing coins over their shoulders - often miss the real drama taking place on the Trevi’s facade - the triumphal arrival of water to Rome’s city center.
The waters that run through the Trevi are deserving of celebration, for they they enter the city (even today) thanks to the astounding architectural achievements of the ancient Romans. In 19 BC, Augustus’s right-hand man, Marcus Agrippa, sought fresh water for his soldiers. Legend says that his search led him to a beautiful Roman maiden who showed him a small spring of wonderfully fresh water some 16 kilometers outside Rome. With the spring revealed, an aqueduct was constructed, and the waters were channeled into the city. Today Agrippa’s aqueduct continues to supply the Trevi Fountain with water, and it also supplies the Fountain of the Leaky Boat (Barcaccia) at the foot of the Spanish Steps and the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona.
In the eighteenth century, when architect Nicola Salvi, and his patron, Pope Clement XII, decided to construct the Trevi (on the site of an earlier fountain), they took antiquity as their model. Just as ancient Roman generals were welcomed back to Rome with elaborate triumphal processions and with the construction of triumphal arches, so the gushing arrival of the Aqua Virgo would be acclaimed.
An earlier fountain (left) existed on the site of Rome’s Trevi Fountain
To give form to this idea, Salvi used a triumphal arch motif to frame the dramatic arrival of Oceanus, the divine personification of water. The god surfs his way through the arch on an oyster-shell chariot that is drawn by powerful winged seahorses and is driven by Tritons blowing on conch shells to herald his arrival.
As visitors to the fountain, we are the lucky spectators who witness this extraordinary aquatic drama. The waters of the Trevi fountain tumble across craggy rocks and we join centuries of viewers in expressing our wonder at the arrival of a god and his element in our presence. For those insistently rational spectators who remain unimpressed by the appearance of the immortal Oceanus, female figures standing in niches on either side of the triumphal arch remind us of the health and abundance brought by the Trevi’s clean and clear waters.
On October 19th, 2007, vandals dyed the waters of the Trevi Fountain red. To read about their act (and to see a photo), click here. Or click here to admire Susan Sanders’ Trevi Shoppers photograph.
