The Trevi Fountain
📍 Old TownThis Baroque fountain’s water comes from a 2,000-year-old Roman aqueduct; toss a coin over your shoulder and, they say, you will return to Rome.
- 🦅 Empire
Empire · A 2,000-Year-Old Aqueduct
The water comes from the 'Aqua Virgo,' built by Agrippa in 19 BC, still flowing today.
Beneath the Trevi's ornate Baroque surface hides an ancient piece of Roman engineering: the aqueduct that feeds it, the 'Aqua Virgo,' was built in 19 BC by Agrippa, Augustus's great general — the same Agrippa who first built the Pantheon. Two thousand years on, the water of this old channel still rushes day and night through the fountain. Rome is often like this: beneath a gorgeous surface, an ancient skeleton still at work.
Sources：Frontinus, On the Aqueducts of Rome (De Aquaeductu)
- 🎨 Arts
↑ Because of the last layer：Precisely because the ancient aqueduct surfaced here, later ages had reason to raise a grand waterscape at its mouth.
Arts · A Baroque Theater of Water
The 18th-century Baroque design turns a whole palace wall into a stage where the sea-god bursts forth on his chariot.
Today the fountain is an eighteenth-century Baroque masterpiece: the designer Nicola Salvi made an entire palace facade into a dramatic waterscape, with the sea-god Neptune (the Greeks' Poseidon) bursting from the rock on a chariot of sea-horses. This shock and movement is exactly what the Baroque sought — a continuation of the Roman style Bernini founded, that makes even stone seem to surge.
🔗 Connects toSources：History of the construction of the Trevi Fountain (1732–1762)
- 📍 Today
Today · The Coin Toss and La Dolce Vita
About €3,000 in coins is tossed in daily, all given to charity; one film made it famous worldwide.
'Stand with your back to the fountain and toss a coin over your left shoulder, and you will return to Rome' — this tradition has tourists throwing in about €3,000 a day, which the city periodically collects and gives entirely to charity. Fellini's 1960 film La Dolce Vita, with its heroine dancing in the basin, made the Trevi a landmark of global pop culture. The outlet of an ancient Roman aqueduct became, in the end, the place where the whole world makes a wish.
Sources：City of Rome records of coin retrieval and donation · Fellini, La Dolce Vita (1960)
🔭 Meanwhile in the world
In Rome：Agrippa completes the Aqua Virgo, bringing water into Rome.
At the same time, elsewhere：At the same time, Rome was in the peace of Augustus, and Jesus was not yet born.
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