Change for good: Fishing coins from Trevi Fountain for charity purposes

Rome has a plethora of fountains but none match the fame of the Fountain of Trevi. PHOTO: REUTERS

Elisabetta Povoledo

UPDATED Jan 01, 2025, 09:51 PM

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ROME – There’s a good chance that many first-time visitors to the Trevi Fountain in Rome know the drill. To ensure a return to the Eternal City, the legend goes, stand with your back to the water and toss a coin with your right hand over your left shoulder.

The ritual became famous around the world thanks to the 1954 film Three Coins in the Fountain, and its eponymous song – recorded by Frank Sinatra – which won the Oscar for best original song.

The coin throw is such a popular item on tourist itineraries that even a recent three-month restoration that cut off direct access to the 18th-century fountain was not a deterrent. Visitors still crowded in front of the transparent panels protecting the work site to lob coins – about €61,000 (S$86,000) worth – into a squat utilitarian tub.

“The tourist is going to toss a coin, he doesn’t care about construction or no construction,” Mr Fabrizio Marchioni said on a chilly December morning a few days before the fountain’s reopening.

He should know.

For 13 years, Mr Marchioni’s principal job for the Roman Catholic charity Caritas has been to collect and count the coins tossed into the fountain.

“These are coins of solidarity” as “they’re put to good use”, said Mr Giustino Trincia, director of Rome’s Caritas branch. More than 52,800 meals were doled out at Caritas soup kitchens in Rome in 2023, just one of many projects the charity runs.

The coins are claimed by Rome’s municipal administration, but it has donated them to Caritas since 2005. The proceeds in 2023 were close to € 2 million.

The recent clean-up of the fountain, 10 years after a major restoration, came just in time for the start of the Catholic Church’s Jubilee Year on Christmas Eve. With some 32 million visitors expected over the next year, Rome is in a state of busy preparation, with dozens of monuments being cleaned and polished.

The fountain’s temporary closure also allowed city officials to test out controlling visitor access. At the reopening, just before Christmas, officials announced that only 400 people at a time would be allowed into the sunken area in front. Visitors will enter at one end of the basin and exit on the other side, with monitors keeping watch during daytime hours.

“The goal is to allow everyone to enjoy the fountain to the fullest without the crush, without confusion,” Mr Roberto Gualtieri, the Mayor of Rome, said at the reopening. The city is also considering charging a nominal fee, he said.

Rome has a plethora of fountains – the public, decorative faces of aqueducts that were originally built by the ancient Romans – but none match the fame of the Fountain of Trevi.

In the early 18th century, “a practically unknown architect” Nicola Salvi, replaced a more modest iteration of the fountain with the monumental work that reaches nearly 35m in height, arguably “the best known monument of modern Rome”, said Mr Claudio Parisi Presicce, Rome’s superintendent for cultural heritage.

Celebrated in a symphony, as well as in artworks over the centuries, the fountain became a cinematic star in the 20th century, most famously in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, where Anita Ekberg throatily called to Marcello Mastroianni to join her as she waded in its waters (an act that would be much frowned upon in real life).

Fresh fame came via the 2024 season of Netflix’s series Emily In Paris, after the protagonist Emily Cooper made the fountain one of her first Roman stops.

The coin-tossing ritual began at the end of the 19th century, when German academics studying in Rome reprised an ancient Roman practice of throwing coins into water for good luck. It quickly caught on.

The coin throw is such a popular item on tourist itineraries that even a recent three-month restoration that cut off direct access to the 18th-century fountain was not a deterrent. PHOTO: REUTERS

Over the decades, the coins – and people sitting on the marble edge of the fountain (another definite no-no) – have contributed to its wear and tear, especially as visitor numbers have risen sharply in recent years.

“These are magnificent, enormous monuments, but they are very delicate,” said Ms Anna Maria Cerioni, who has overseen many of Rome’s fountains for three decades in her role as head of restoration for the city’s art superintendency.

The minerals in the coins often leave marks on the product used to waterproof the basin. Specially developed for the fountain, it is known as “Trevi White”, and periodic maintenance is necessary.

The fountain is still supplied by the Aqua Virgo, built in the first century BC, and the only one of the 11 aqueducts built by the ancient Romans that has remained almost constantly in use, said Mr Marco Tesan, who oversees the maintenance of some of Rome’s fountains and aqueducts for the water and electricity utility ACEA.

Twice a week, the utility’s workers use a machine developed for swimming pools to suck up the coins from the basin. During the maintenance phase, brooms and dustpans sufficed, “though you still feel achy at the end of the day”, said Mr Luca Tasselli of ACEA.

At the fountain, the collected coins are weighed under the oversight of city police officers before Mr Marchioni takes them to Caritas offices. There, they are first washed under tap water, then laid out on a towel-lined table so that impurities can be removed. Along with other stuff.

Larger objects commonly found in the fountain, like bottles, umbrellas, fruit and drinking glasses, are removed directly by ACEA workers. Mr Marchioni and the volunteers who help him root out smaller items.

Recently found: religious medals, guitar picks, subway tokens, keys, marbles, shells, and pins of all shapes and sizes. Bracelets and rings were also common, and Mr Marchioni surmised that they might have fallen off during particularly enthusiastic tosses.

Expensive-looking jewelry is turned over to the police.

Because there isn’t a market for coin-drying machines, Caritas tasked a company that makes machines to dry cutlery with converting one for its purposes. The coins are dried and then passed through a machine that separates euro coins from everything else. It’s so sophisticated that it even detected a bunch of fake two-euro coins that were making the rounds in May and June.

Foreign currency is sent to a company to exchange, which can get troublesome, Mr Marchioni said. “Let’s say that tossing euro coins is best,” he said.

The proceeds are used for a variety of projects, from youth activities to care programmes for people with Alzheimer’s disease. Mostly, Caritas helps needy families make ends meet, reaching almost 10,000 people in 2023, said Mr Trincia of Caritas.

He added that he hoped tourists visiting Rome were aware of the good they are doing through the fountain. “Poverty doesn’t go on holiday,” he said. NYTIMES

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