The whistle blew and euros sailed through the air over a few dozen shoulders. One of the more priceless moments in gaggle tourism (aka. group tours) experienced some 15 years ago whilst on vacation with my mum continuing like we’d never left. Another whistle for gaggle change-over and the next group of same-capped coin hurlers shuffled into position for their synchronised good luck chuck… welcome to the Fellini lovers’ Trevvi Fountain.
Do a Google search for ‘Trevvi’ and there’s a good 400,000 results to trawl and a few million more photographs involving time delays, retouched thunderous skylines and fish-eyed ‘mine’s clearly the most unique’ snaps. Look-up Niccolò Salvi on the other hand and Wikipedia struggles to give you more than a paragraph of birth and death info for the fountain’s chief architect. Salvi, like many of his educated brotherhood was involved in a few of the 1,000s of Roman Baroque commissioned builds of his time. 99% of these go aheads were given by the humble church leadership… thank God for the Roman Catholics sucking guilt-laden tax payers pockets dry to give us the fabulous preserved city that still stands today.
The Trevvi Fountain defines Roman triumph. Back in 1629 Bernini was engaged by Pope Urban VIII, famous for his national debt building artistic indulgence and establishment of the Vatican’s arsenal to sketch some necessary blinged-up theatrical embellishment for the existing fountain. Prior to this time it served as the more functional end point for a 22km aqueduct system feeding Rome her Pellegrino. Over the centuries this was destroyed a few times and rebuilt again in the 15th century.
After Urban’s death they pulled the plug on development until in 1730 Pope Clement XII ran a ‘who can build the prettiest new fountain’ national beauty pageant. Salvi was not the original winner but the decision was overturned by his popularity with the people. Unfortunately he died half-way through the build in 1751 and the 20m wide ‘as we see it today’ facade was completed in the following year in 1762 by Giuseppe Pannini (perhaps the son of a baker?). Pannini replacing a proposed testosterone laden representation of the aqueducts’ founder Agrippa with a more curvaceous mythological figurine of Abundance.
The result is a gushing facade of embellished gorgeousness which has been captured in Respighi’s Fontane di Roma and Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita, and of course re-created at Disney’s Epcot World in Florida for those wanting to see the world in a Vegas style fibre glass’d day.
The myth behind all this coin throwing is that an over the shoulder guarantees one’s return to Rome. There is a good side to this flock of tossers. Around 3,000 Euro is collected from the ritual every day which has been used to build a supermarket for the city’s underprivileged. Nice work Rome.
Some top-10′ers are worth the crowd tackle and the Trevvi Fountain is definitely one of them. Don’t expect that special movie set romanticism alone with your significant other, but with the help of a few hours of Photoshop you can ensure the moment was yours alone.
Copper plate engraving: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1773
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