Trevi Fountain site features

You hear it before you see it. The Trevi is wedged into a small square at the meeting of three narrow streets, and there is no distant view of it: you come round a corner and the whole thing is suddenly in front of you, filling an entire building end to end. It is 26 metres high and 49 wide — the size of a church facade, with a fountain run through it.

The architecture and the rock are the same object. A palace front of columns and a triumphal arch rises at the back; out of its central niche the stone turns, without a seam, into a cliff of jagged travertine reefs that spills forward and down into the basin. Where the building stops and the rock starts is deliberately impossible to point at.

In the middle, a giant steps out of the arch. Oceanus, bare-chested, one arm thrown wide, riding a chariot shaped like a shell. It is pulled by two hippocamps — horses with fish tails — led by two tritons: the horse on the left rearing and fighting, the one on the right calm and docile, which is the sea in its two moods.

The water is the loudest thing in the quarter. It comes over the reefs in a dozen falls at once into a wide basin of blue-green water, and the noise bounces off the buildings enclosing the square, so the piazza is full of sound in a way the photographs cannot carry.

Down at the basin there is now a low barrier and a staffed entrance. Since February 2026 the catino — the step down nearest the water, where everyone used to sit — is a ticketed enclosure at two euros. The rest of the square is unchanged: crowded at all hours, and free.

Salubrity

This sculptural masterpiece is a magnificent theatrical representation of the forces of the sea. Under a sober Arch of Triumph, the main figure of the fountain is that of the god Neptune (god of the sea). He is riding a shell-shaped type of chariot that many horses pull. The sea's fluctuating moods are symbolized by having some calm and obedient horses while others are restive and agitated. The galloping over water horses are guided by Triton (messenger of the sea). The water represents the sea at the bottom. A small niche to the left of Neptune has the statue of Abundance, while another on the right has the one of Salubrity.

Horses and Tritons

According to legend, if you toss a coin into the fountain's water, you'll be back to visit Rome someday.