A Baroque fountain, still fed by an ancient aqueduct
The Trevi Fountain in Rome still runs on water carried by the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct Roman engineers built around 19 BC, making it the only ancient Roman aqueduct never to stop flowing. The Baroque fountain seen today, designed by Nicola Salvi and finished in 1762, stands against Palazzo Poli near an ancient crossing of three roads.
An ancient aqueduct outlasted three failed fountain designs
The Trevi Fountain is a Baroque fountain carved from Roman travertine and Carrara marble, standing 86 feet high against the back wall of Palazzo Poli. Its water still runs through the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct Roman engineers built in 19 BC to carry fresh water nearly 14 miles into the city. That water once fed the Baths of Agrippa and has never fully stopped flowing since.
By the Middle Ages the aqueduct's end point stood near a crossing of three roads, the "tre vie" that gave the fountain its name. In 1453, Pope Nicholas V had Leon Battista Alberti join three old spouts into one long basin. That simple fountain lasted over two centuries.
In 1629, Pope Urban VIII found it dull and asked Gian Lorenzo Bernini to redesign it. Only a plain basin got built before the pope died in 1644, and the project stalled.
A century later, Pope Clement XII ran a contest for a grand replacement. The Roman architect Nicola Salvi lost to a Florentine rival, Alessandro Galilei, but public anger over a non-Roman winning pushed the commission back to Salvi. Work began in 1732.
Salvi died in 1751 with the fountain only half finished. He never saw the barber's shop sign he'd hidden behind a carved stone vase, now called the "Ace of Cups" by Romans. Giuseppe Pannini took over as architect, and sculptor Pietro Bracci carved the central statue of Oceanus riding a shell chariot pulled by sea horses. Legend wrongly calls the figure Neptune.
Workers died building it. One stonecutter was reportedly crushed under a block of travertine during construction. Pope Clement XIII finally opened the finished fountain on 22 May 1762, thirty years after Salvi first broke ground.
Anita Ekberg waded into the fountain for Fellini
Rome treated the finished fountain as a backdrop for centuries before it became a world-famous stop. Water from the ancient Aqua Virgo kept running through it, drawn from a spring found more than 13 miles outside the city under Emperor Augustus. In 1960, director Federico Fellini sent actress Anita Ekberg wading into the basin in an evening gown for La Dolce Vita. The scene was shot in winter, and she stood in freezing water for the camera.
A Hollywood film made coin-throwing a global custom
Hollywood had already turned the fountain into a wish-making machine. The 1954 film Three Coins in the Fountain spread the idea that a tossed coin guarantees a return trip to Rome, a second coin brings romance, and a third brings marriage. Some guides trace coin-throwing to an older Roman habit of offering coins to water for safe travel. Others credit the German archaeologist Wolfgang Helbig with starting the custom in the 1800s, tossing a coin in as a sad goodbye to the city he loved.
Smog and a burst aqueduct forced repeated cleanings
The fountain needed real care by the late 20th century. Smog had stained the travertine and marble, so crews scrubbed it clean in 1988. A second cleaning followed in 1998, when workers fitted the fountain with recirculating pumps so its water could be reused. In 2007, construction elsewhere in Rome accidentally damaged the Aqua Virgo aqueduct, and the fountain had to be drained while repairs were made.
Fendi paid for the fountain's biggest restoration
The biggest overhaul came next. The Italian fashion house Fendi paid for a restoration costing more than 2 million euros, the most thorough cleaning and repair in the fountain's history. Workers cleaned centuries of grime from the marble and travertine, waterproofed the basin, and installed more than 100 LED lights to light the statues at night. The fountain reopened on 3 November 2015 with an official ceremony.
Activists dyed the fountain's water black with charcoal
Trouble returned in 2023. Climate activists from the group Ultima Generazione dyed the fountain's water black with charcoal as a protest. Because the fountain recirculates its water, cleaning it meant draining and replacing roughly 300,000 liters, a costly job that drew criticism from Rome's mayor.
A walkway let visitors watch the fountain's latest cleaning
Routine maintenance returned in October 2024, ahead of the Vatican's 2025 Jubilee Holy Year. Crews installed glass panels and a horseshoe-shaped walkway over the water so visitors could keep viewing the fountain during the cleaning. The work finished in December 2024, and the fountain reopened on 22 December with new crowd limits capping visitors at 400 people at a time.
Beneath all of this, archaeologists have found an underground "city of water," ruins of ancient buildings and a private Roman villa, dating back to Nero's era, buried beneath the fountain and the surrounding streets. A short walk from the fountain, the church of Saints Vincent and Anastasius in Trevi Square holds something stranger still: the preserved internal organs of 22 popes, kept there after centuries of papal burials.
Daily coins collected here fund help for Rome's poor
The coins thrown into the fountain, nearly $3,000 a day, get collected and handed to Caritas, a Catholic charity that funds help for Rome's homeless and poor.
The fountain still runs on water drawn from a spring found by Roman engineers more than two thousand years ago.
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