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The Baroque of Rome Trevi Fountain opened Saturday morning with selfie-takers lining a newly installed metal walkway as workers begin the painstaking process of painstakingly cleaning the 18th-century masterpiece.
The walkway, made of construction scaffolding and covered with a vinyl carpet, can accommodate 130 people at a time, giving tourists the chance to get up close to the statue of Oceanus and his horse-drawn chariot.
But a word of warning for visitors to the attraction, as tossing a coin into the fountain, a long-standing tradition, is now banned.
Anyone who does this risks a fine of €50. Coins may only be thrown into a small temporary basin between the walkway and the paved square.
The $330,000 cleanup and restoration project will last until December, Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri told CNN Saturday morning.
The walkway and temporary basin are a necessary step towards finding the delicate balance between conservation and tourism. By studying the busy times of the day when the walkway is used, the city can better manage crowds.
“The aim is to improve the experience of visitors to create a unique experience to admire the fountain and to avoid overcrowding,” he said.
“Therefore, there is a limit to the number of people who can stay on this walkway. But even after the end of the maintenance work, there will be a limit to the number of people who can be in the fountain area to admire it.”
From the elevated walkway, the details of the 18th-century sculpture are breathtaking. But from this vantage point you can also see millions of dents in the stone ledge at the edge of the fountain, caused by flying coins.
Also visible are thousands of round traces of rust from the coins lying in the water. Every year, more than €1.5 million in change is taken from the fountain and given to the Catholic charity Caritas, but the projectiles have taken their toll on the monument.
Once the fountain is back to normal and filled with water, Gualtieri said the city would eventually like to introduce a ticketing system to help limit crowds. He said this will also make the experience better for tourists, many of whom seem happy to pay the price.
American tourist Arlene Speling, from Florida, was waiting in line when the walkway first opened. She expressed doubts about whether the possible new measures would help with crowd control. “I think anyone would pay €2 to come. If you travel here, this is one of the main attractions of Rome, right?” she told CNN.
The restoration is one of dozens of projects taking place in the Eternal City ahead of the Vatican’s Holy Jubilee in 2025, when the city expects millions of additional visitors.
The fountain was last repaired and cleaned in 2014, a job that took over a year to complete. The mayor has promised that this time the Trevi Fountain will be ready in just five weeks.
“We are working very hard to be ready for the anniversary and all the construction sites that were supposed to be ready in December would be ready in December,” he said.
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