The True Spirit of Italy

So instead of studying on all day on Saturday as we had planned, we decided to make a trip to the famous Trevi Fountain. It's a very remarkable sight to see and a great place to people watch too. The legend surrounding the Fountain is that if you toss a coin into the fountain, backwards and over your shoulder you will return to Rome. If you toss another coin, you'll fall in love with an Italian. Finally, if you toss a third coin, you'll fall in love and marry an Italian. So as you can imagine, there is a lot of money being tossed into the Trevi Fountain by the massive crowd.

As we marvelled at the beauty of the fountain we noticed a twenty-something reaching into the fountain (practically swimming) and picking up the coins and putting them in his pockets. Out of nowhere, an older Italian guy starts yelling at him and we started rooting for the old Italian guy to teach him a lesson. The old guy walked away and they came back and yelled at him some more. We were really enjoying the show and thought for sure the younger guy would stop reaching into the fountain. He didn't, in fact he went deeper and deeper and pulled out even more coins. Then he decided to make his escape before he got into trouble.

The infamous Trevi Fountain

We were troubled by this because all of the coins pulled out of the Fountain go to various charities around Rome. As we discussed how awful it was to steal from charities we noticed the old man was back along the edge of the fountain. He scanned the crowd and from his sleeve, he pulled out a telescopic pole and dipped it into the fountain. About three seconds later, he reeled in his catch, looked to be four or five coins probably at least 5 euros or more. He did this a few more times then moved on.

We were shocked and were wondering where the police were or if they even cared about this stuff. All of a sudden, another guy showed up and dipped his pole into the water and did the same thing as the old guy. Some people were taking pictures, videotaping or just standing around with the same shocked looked on their faces as we had.

Moral of the story: if you ever go to the Trevi Fountain (which you should) thow your coins as far as you can!

Here is a link to a really interesting story about a homeless man that pulled up hundreds of thousands of euros over thirty years at the fountain.

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/07/31/italy.fountain/index.html?related