“Madame de Staël says that when the waters of the Trevi fountain
stop playing because of some repair, it is as if a great silence falls over all
Rome…The architecture of this Trevi fountain, backed
by the Buoncompagni Palace, can be commended only for its mass and
the historié memory by which we learn that this water lias flowed thus
for 1846 years. The fall of these rather abundant sheets of water to the
bottom of a square surrounded by tall houses makes a little more noise
than the Bondi fountain on the boulevard. Agrippa, Augustus’s son-in-
law, whose thoughtful and serious face was revealed to us yesterday by
the admirable bust of him at the Capitol, had a fourteen-mile aqueduct
built to bring this water to Rome. It is called aqua vergine because a young girl indicated it to some thirsty soldiers. It reached the Baths of
Agrippa, behind the Panthéon, for the first time on June 9th in the year
735 by the Roman calendar…”