Forty Minutes at the Trevi Fountain and the Domus Below It

The aqueduct that fills the Trevi Fountain is two thousand years old and has never stopped working. That is the thread this short tour follows, from the sculpture above ground to the water channel underneath it. It starts in front of the fountain, and the guide reads it the way it was meant to be read. The figures emerging from the rock are not decoration arranged around a basin: the whole facade is one composition about water arriving in a city, and there is an order in which to look at it. Most people photograph it and leave in four minutes without noticing the order at all. The sound is part of the design too, and once that is pointed out it is hard to stop hearing. Then down nine metres into the archaeological site: the remains of an imperial Roman house and, running through it, the only working ancient aqueduct in Rome, still delivering the water to the fountain above your head. Forty minutes in total, which is enough for both without stretching either. The coin comes at the end, after the legends about where the habit started. The order the guide reads the facade in has a subject. At the centre is Oceanus, not Neptune, on a shell chariot pulled by two sea horses, one straining and one docile, for water in its two tempers. Above and to the left a girl points soldiers towards a spring; to the right, Agrippa approves the plan for the channel that would carry it in. The girl is the reason the aqueduct is called the Virgo. Salvi began the facade in 1732 and did not live to see it finished; Pannini completed it thirty years later. What is underneath was not looked for. It came up between 1999 and 2001 during works on a disused cinema off the square, which is why the entrance is a doorway in a lane rather than anything monumental, and why the rooms sit at the level the Roman city stood at. The meeting address is on Piazza di Trevi itself, which sounds convenient and is not. The square is rarely less than full and a small group forming in it is hard to pick out. Arrive early, work out which side of the basin the number is on, and then stay where you are. Forty minutes buys a live guide, a headset and the admission to the excavation, and nothing beyond that. It is a contained booking, which makes it useful in the gap before a timed entry somewhere else and a poor choice if what you wanted was a walk around the quarter. The coin goes in last. Right hand over the left shoulder is the form, and what is thrown gets swept up and handed to a Catholic charity, which is the part of the ritual nobody photographs.