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During the summer months in Rome, an insane huge of tourists will flock to the Instagrammable Trevi Fountain hoping the 18th-century masterpiece will be the perfect backdrop for their very own La Dolce Vita moment.

Legend has it that if you use your right hand to launch a coin over your left shoulder, you will return to Rome at some point in your life.

Seeing as how Rome is one of the most visited places on Earth, and the legend has been running for almost a hundred years, a lot of coins get tossed into the fountain.

The money is collected twice a week, with signs around the fountain explaining that the change will go to charity. Besides it being illegal to climb into the pond, this also makes scalping from the wishing well a moral no-no, so tourists generally adhere to the advice.

 

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Extracting the coins is a spectacle, as Reuters reports, with workers from regional utility ACEA balancing on the edge of the vast Baroque fountain, using long brooms and suction hoses to get the dough. The work must be carried out as quickly as possible “to try to reduce the downtime of the fountain,” according to Francesco Prisco, a manager at ACEA.

The coins are then given to Caritas, a not-for-profit organisation run by the Catholic Church. It uses the money to fund a food bank, soup kitchen and welfare projects in Rome.

The charities are seemingly well-funded as the 300-year-old fountain is reported to collect about 1.4 million euros (R27 million) from tourists, and it expects to ‘pond’ even more in 2024.

With about 21 million tourists visiting Rome each year, and the majority stopping at Trevi Fountain for a quick photo, it seems to be the most ingenious tax the Vatican didn’t come up with.

Trevi Fountain was made famous by Italian film director Federico Fellini, who set the famous “La Dolce Vita” scene there. In it, Anita Ekberg wades into the fountain after midnight and beckons Marcello Mastroianni to join her.

They don’t toss coins over their left shoulders though. That’s a tourist thing.

[source:nypost]