LETTER FROM ROME
In the heart of a city jammed with tourists, among the throngs of visitors taking selfies, jostling blindly while nonchalantly holding ice cream cones, Jia Yiwen is a little disappointed. For several days now, the Chinese woman has been following in the footsteps of influencer Skylar on the social network Xiaohongshu ("Little Red Book" in Mandarin), a platform with 312 million subscribers named after the Maoist doctrine book. In post after post, she saw Skylar posing at the Vatican, in front of the Pantheon, near the Colosseum... She noted down each place to visit, with one particular desire: to see the Trevi Fountain.
After taking a selfie with her husband Ma Chuan Qi, 28, Jia Yiwen showed her phone screen: Skylar posing in a white dress, sitting on the edge of the fountain, her back to a setting of large stones and clear water that seemed to exist only for her.
"I thought it would be like that," Jia Yiwen said sadly. She couldn't tell that the photographer had kept the tired crowds of tourists in shorts, tacky souvenir shops, and a huge candy store with a Pirates of the Caribbean theme off-camera.
"It's much smaller than I imagined. It's so crowded... And you can't even reach the edge of the fountain to throw a coin," she sighed. She had heard about the lucky coin toss in a song by Jolin Tsai, a Taiwanese pop star. The traveler doesn't know it yet, but copying her favorite influencer could soon come at a cost. On Monday, October 7, the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, announced that the idea of charging a fee for access to the Trevi Fountain was under consideration. On the same day, the city started restoration work on the architectural masterpiece, one of Rome's most powerful tourist magnets.
Enclosed by metal barriers, the lower section of the fountain is currently inaccessible. Soon the fountain will be hidden behind panels with openings and, during the restoration work, a footbridge will be erected to allow a limited number of visitors to admire the statues that are otherwise invisible from the square. This initial phase will serve as a test for a system designed to manage the large flow of tourists, with stewards controlling access to the site. If the trial is successful, it could lead to the creation of a paid-access zone in the lower part of the square, near the edge of the fountain. The fee would be symbolic, ranging from €1 to €2.
"For at least the last 15 years, we've been witnessing a rush whose sole aim is to take the best possible selfie. An attitude that leaves little room for the history and majesty of one of the world's most beautiful monuments," said Alessandro Onorato, Rome's city councillor for tourism, in an interview with La Repubblica. The problem is that the Trevi Fountain is much more than just stones and water. It's made of the stuff of dreams. Built at the end of an aqueduct commissioned by the emperor Agrippa (63-12 BC) and still in operation today, the monument in its current form dates back to the 18th century, with allegories and seahorses. An iconic scene from Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) made it legendary.
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