The Trevi Fountain is not just a Baroque sculpture. It is the still-functioning terminus of one of the longest-running pieces of public infrastructure in Western history - the Acqua Vergine, an aqueduct that has been bringing water from a spring 19 km east of Rome to this exact spot for 2,038 years. Marcus Agrippa built it in 19 BC to supply his new public baths near the Pantheon. The aqueduct survived the fall of the Roman Empire, the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Baroque - in continuous use, supplying drinking water to central Rome. The 1762 fountain by Nicola Salvi is the most recent of three Baroque-era terminal redesigns. The water still flows. Every cubic metre passing through the Trevi has come from the same spring that supplied Augustus.
The Acqua Vergine
The Aqua Virgo (Acqua Vergine in Italian) takes its name from the legend that a virgin (a young woman) showed Roman soldiers the spring east of Rome in the 1st century BC. Agrippa built the 19 km underground aqueduct in 19 BC; almost all of it is still in use, still maintained, still bringing water to fountains across central Rome. The Pantheon's surrounding fountains, the Piazza Navona fountains, the Trevi, the Spanish Steps' Barcaccia fountain - they all run on the same Acqua Vergine source. The water is drinkable, refreshing, and slightly mineralised; the fountains are public, working drinking-water sources, and Romans still fill bottles at them. The Trevi water is not technically the same that goes into the fountain (it's recirculated in the basin) but the Acqua Vergine supplies the flow.
Salvi's fountain, 1732-1762
The terminal display we know was a major Baroque commission - Pope Clement XII held an architectural competition in 1730. Nicola Salvi won; construction began in 1732 and continued for 30 years. Salvi died in 1751 with the work unfinished; Pietro Bracci completed it. The central figure is Oceanus, the Greco-Roman titan of the world's encircling ocean, riding a shell-chariot drawn by two seahorses (one calm, one wild - representing the moods of the sea). Tritons accompany him. The two side niches contain Abundance (with the cornucopia) and Salubrity (with the cup). The architecture is the facade of Palazzo Poli behind, treated as a triumphal arch. The whole composition is 26 metres high, 49 metres wide. It is the largest Baroque fountain in Rome.
Fellini and Anita Ekberg
The Trevi was famous before 1960 but Fellini made it iconic. La Dolce Vita (1960) - Fellini's masterpiece - has the scene where Anita Ekberg (as Sylvia) wades into the Trevi at night in her black evening dress and Marcello Mastroianni (as Marcello) follows her. The scene was shot in March 1959; the water was so cold that Ekberg, a Swedish actress used to skiing temperatures, was unmoved but Mastroianni reportedly needed several brandies to do his takes. The film won the Palme d'Or, the moment became unforgettable, and the Trevi went from "famous Roman fountain" to "the most-photographed fountain in the world". The coin-throwing legend - throw a coin over your left shoulder using your right hand to ensure you return to Rome - actually comes from a different film (Three Coins in the Fountain, 1954), but the two have merged in the popular imagination.
The Spanish Steps, 1726
The 135-step staircase from Piazza di Spagna to Trinità dei Monti was built between 1723 and 1726 by Francesco de Sanctis. The funding came from a French diplomat, Étienne Gueffier, who left money in his will (1660s) to improve access to the French-built Trinità dei Monti church at the top of the hill. The Spanish name comes from the Piazza di Spagna at the bottom, named for the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See nearby. The design is Rococo - the staircase fans out and reconverges in three landings, with the curved balustrades creating the famous photogenic geometry.
Through the 18th and 19th centuries the steps were the centre of the British and American expatriate community in Rome - the "ghetto degli inglesi" was the streets around Piazza di Spagna. Keats lived at #26. The Caffè Greco on Via Condotti was the meeting point. The flower-and-portrait market on the lower steps was a daily fixture (the photographer-and-painter community that worked the bottom of the steps gave the area its bohemian reputation through to the 1960s). Today the steps are still the most-photographed staircase in Europe; the no-sitting rule (since 2019) has made the experience more orderly but less atmospheric.
Keats's last weeks
John Keats arrived in Rome in November 1820 already sick - tuberculosis had been progressing for two years. His doctors had sent him from London to Italy in the hope that the warmer climate might prolong his life. He moved into the apartment at 26 Piazza di Spagna with his friend Joseph Severn (a painter, who cared for him to the end). His health deteriorated rapidly through December and January 1821. He died on 23 February 1821, aged 25, having published only 50 poems. He had asked that his gravestone bear no name, only the words "Here lies one whose name was writ in water" - the inscription that is on his grave in the Cimitero Acattolico (the Protestant Cemetery, near the Pyramid, a 25-min walk south of Trastevere).
The room where Keats died has been preserved more or less as it was - the deathbed, the small writing desk, the window onto the Spanish Steps that he watched through his last weeks. The Keats-Shelley Memorial House (since 1909) holds manuscripts, hair locks, death masks (both Keats's and Shelley's, who drowned 18 months later off La Spezia), a fragment of the Mediterranean rosary Keats was holding when he died, and the largest collection of Keats first editions in Europe. €5 entry; closed Sundays and the first half of August. The custodian on duty is usually willing to tell you the full story if you ask.
Via Condotti and the Caffè Greco
The 500-metre Via Condotti running west from Piazza di Spagna to Via del Corso is Rome's luxury-shopping spine. The street has held high-end retail since the 17th century (the Roman aristocracy lived in this quarter; the shopkeepers came to serve them). Bulgari was founded on Via Condotti in 1884 (at #10, still the founding store). Cartier, Hermès, Gucci, Prada, Salvatore Ferragamo (#67-68), Tiffany, Damiani all have major flagships. The Caffè Greco at #86 - opened in 1760 by a Greek man named Nicola della Maddalena - was the meeting point of the Grand Tour. Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Liszt, Wagner, Stendhal, Mark Twain, Hans Christian Andersen, Felix Mendelssohn all drank here. The walls of the cafe are hung with their portraits and letters. The cafe has been closed for restoration since October 2024 (with a reopening planned for end of 2026); the interior has been listed as a National Cultural Heritage since 2017.
Bernini and Borromini, here too
Just east of the Trevi quarter, Piazza Barberini is anchored by Bernini's Fontana del Tritone (1643) - a 13-foot Triton emerging from a giant scallop shell held up by four dolphins, blowing a conch shell from which water sprays upward. The Palazzo Barberini behind it - originally built 1625-1633 by Carlo Maderno with input from Bernini and Borromini - houses the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, with Caravaggio's "Judith Beheading Holofernes" and "Narcissus", Raphael's "Fornarina" (the portrait of his mistress Margherita Luti), Holbein's portrait of Henry VIII, and works by Tintoretto, Filippo Lippi, El Greco. €15 entry. The under-the-pavement Capuchin Crypt on Via Veneto (5 min north) is the other curiosity - the bones of 3,700 Capuchin friars arranged decoratively in five small underground chapels (since the 1730s). €10 entry; not for everyone but unforgettable for those who go.
