Page 1: Fountain with a Panorama of Rome
It’s certainly no easy task to write about this little fountain that you will find standing where Viale della Trinità de’ Monti [Trinity on the Mount] widens out between the austere and imposing walls of the 16th century Villa Medici on one side and a panorama of Rome on the other, and I’ll tell you why.
This fountain, as pleasing as it is simple, consists of an ancient basin of red granite, about 4 meters across, resting on a large octagonal-based baluster emerging from a water pool – also octagonal – at ground level. About all anyone who has written about it can say is that there are very few records of the history of this fountain, and even those have no basis in fact. That may be why – as often happens in such cases – being short of material, these authors have had to embroider the stories about the fountain somewhat until, as one thread followed another, the most exotic flowers blossomed dramatically around this serene and anything but ostentatious little fountain. Among the many complicated Pindaric flights of fancy that surround this fountain, it will be enough to select one that is quite recent, since it embraces all the digressions of the earlier writers. With what is perhaps the last, but mightiest, stroke of the pen it manages to describe the fountain as "the masterpiece by Alessandro de’ Medici and Annibale Lippi, certainly the most beautiful of all the Roman fountains".
Well, apart from the fact that the two gentlemen mentioned have absolutely nothing to do with the question, it seems to me that now we’ve seen how the writers finally winged their way practically to heaven, it’s time to return to earth and actually look at the fountain with our own eyes. However, I must say in their defense that earlier writers confused the whole with the part so that they came to see transcendent and indescribable beauty in this fountain when actually they were being deluded by the evocative beauty of the location. As already mentioned, this meant on the one hand the daunting and unequalled austerity of the façade of the Villa Medici; on the other, the panorama of Rome, of which, however, if truth were told, very little can be seen from here – and that only with some difficulty.
Nonetheless, quite honestly it is hard not to be influenced by this shady avenue of oak trees set quietly apart around this fountain. This is a place where, especially in the lovely evenings of a Roman summer, here close to the fountain, lovers like to walk beneath the heavy dusting of stars and the even heavier dust of the streets; where, with eyes wide open, they yell sweet nothings into each other’s ears and gesture wildly to make themselves understood above the din of the thousands and thousands of cars which, given the tranquil and isolated location, roar past at the speed of a Grand Prix.
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