Welcome to Fountain Head,

where you'll find my thoughts on the fountains I know and love, and fountains I have yet to visit. If you’ve stumbled upon my site in your search for Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, you’ve come to the wrong place. (Sorry, I’m not a Rand fan.)

Why fountains? In addition to all the reasons I plan to exhaust you with in the course of this blog, I offer this:

“The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size."

-Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief

My fountain fanaticism (fountainaticism?) also dovetails nicely with vacation itineraries. Instead of becoming overwhelmed with choices—or surrendering to a random spin of a globe—I simply start where the water is, and go from there.

I’ll start with one of my favorites, the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Yes, I realize it’s the eye-rollingly obvious choice, but what can I say? The occasion demands Bernini’s masterpiece.















Each time I visit the Trevi (three times now), I suffer a slight childlike disappointment that Neptune isn’t spitting water all over his beard or that his horses aren’t forever relieving themselves in infinite streams of colorless urine. No urns overflowing, no cutesy cherubs piddling, no water coming out of naughty places. In this way, the fountain is grand, yet low concept, ornamental, yet sensible (the fountain is also part of an aqueduct that once supplied water to Rome). But in the end, it's the Trevi and I really can't complain.

At night, Trevi is particularly luminous. See: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, the famous scene where Anita Ekberg sheds her stole and takes an evening dip, a gown as her swimsuit. (Try doing that now and you'll be taken for a coin thief and hauled off.)

But my appetite for seeing water shoot out of every kind of orifice is always satisfied at Versailles. Detail of the Latona Fountain sculpted 1668–1670 by Gaspard and Balthazar Marsy:















Fountain Vomitus

Roman myth tells us of Latona, the mother of Diana and Apollo, who was ridiculed and pelted with mud by Lycian peasants as she and her children tried to drink from a pool. As punishment, Jupiter (Zeus) turned the peasants into frogs. If that weren’t enough, they were made to stand frozen at Versailles for all eternity for the sole pleasure of tourists.

Ciao.

Latona photo by Luchonda