Trevi Fountain in Rome. Once you manage to work your way through the massive crowd, it is customary to throw coins into the fountain over your shoulder.

We both threw one each.

I’d heard of Trevi Fountain; it was on our list of things to see in Rome, but I had no idea what it was (besides being a fountain, obviously), where it was, or why I wanted to see it. When we first arrived in Rome, we took the subway from the main (Termini) station to Barberini station.

As we exited the subway, we were immediately facing a statue which, for some reason, assume was Trevi Fountain. If you know Rome at all, you’ll know it’s not, but I’ll continue. We found our hotel and the next morning passed by the statue. It was then I found the fountain we’d seen is actually one of Triton, not the famous fountain.

A day or two later, we came across Trevi Fountain (whether by luck, design or intent I cannot remember) and the difference is staggering. Trevi Fountain may not look large in the photo (I hope it does), but it’s a few stories high and incredibly wide. It is also totally surrounded by people sitting, standing, pushing and taking photos.

Normally I’d remove the people from this shot, but I intentionally left them in to try and get a feel of what it’s like to be there, and to try and give you a sense of scale (look at the people at the left of shot). It’s huge! What’s surprising is that the other side of the fountain is just a regular building (like the one on the right). I think it was a government or city administrative building, but one can’t be sure.

Day Twenty-Eight
Rome
4 September 2007 23:12

Even though we have tickets to cover public transport for the duration of our stay here, the Metro doesn’t quite go where we want today and we don’t have a bus map.  So, we walked.

First, we visited Piazza Colonna, which seems to have a replica of Trajan´s Column.  This lead us further West towards the Tiber on our way to the Pantheon.

Before we reached the Pantheon, we found a clothing outlet selling three piece suits for only 30€!  The suit I tried on was 100% wool but in the end I decided not to buy it.

I did now know the Pantheon had been converted to a church in 608AD so was a tad annoyed to enter such an amazing building and see it “church-ified”.  Still, we were both looking up to see the incredible roof which after 2000 years is still standing.  Just astouding.

After some confusion we found Piazza Navona, which was nice but we didn’t stay long.  Area Sacra was our next destination, it housed 4 2500-year old temples but curiously is now a cat sanctuary with hundreds of cats.  Crazy!

Moving on, we saw the real Trajan’s Column and the markets, as well as the recently discovered Caesar and Augustus Forums which would have been very impressive judging from what we saw.

We next headed to Trevi Fountain which is a huge fountain with hundreds of people chucking in money.  The sheer size of the thing is incredible and surpassed what I expected.  Very cool.

More wandering leads us to the uninteresting Augustus Mausoleum and then to Palazzo di Giustizia.  This was big but not open to us.  Next was the Castel Sant Angelo which is very nice since I wasn’t expecting anything.  We went inside and I kept taking photos much to Justine’s chagrin.  I filled two cards today which I haven’t done in a while.

After emptying the cards we headed out to get some dinner and ended up at a wine bar with tables and chairs literally in the alley.  I had a glass of red (Porcia Rossi or something) and Justine had “champagne”.  Both were good and I will have to rethink my “not a wino” policy.  For food I had a great lasagne and Justine had spinach and ricotta ravioli.  After so much crap Italian food this dinner finally showed us that the food here can actually be good!

So far I have taken 7,567 photos so it looks like I may crack 10,000 by the end of the trip.