The Barcaccia Fountain is the most photographed and least looked at fountain in Rome, and the staircase behind it is to blame.
You arrive in Piazza di Spagna, raise your eyes towards Trinità dei Monti, take the picture with the steps in the background, and the fountain ends up in the bottom corner of the frame, reduced to a basin of white stone where somebody is filling a bottle.
And yet it is a boat. A travertine boat, half submerged, with water coming in over its sides and sinking it forever without ever sinking it.
I walked past it hundreds of times before noticing the thing that changes everything: that fountain sits below the level of the paving. It is not a scenographic whim, it is the answer to a technical problem, and it is why the fountain exists in this shape.
Let us start there.
Why the fountain is sunk into the paving
In 1623 Pope Urban VIII Barberini revived a plan begun half a century earlier: to give Rome’s main squares public fountains fed by the Acqua Vergine, the ancient aqueduct brought back into service in the Renaissance.
Piazza di Spagna is one of the intended points, and here the aqueduct arrives with very low pressure. In a place like this a vertical fountain with jets and cascades does not work: the water would rise a few centimetres and fall straight back.
The solution was to stop fighting the problem and turn it into the subject. If the water cannot rise, then let it fall: the basin is dug below street level, and the little pressure available is enough to make the water spill over the sides of a boat that seems to be taking on water from every direction.
The result is a fountain you cannot see from a distance and only discover when you reach it. In the seventeenth century this was a new way of thinking about a public fountain: not a monument to be looked at, but a scene you step into.
Water flows from two large suns, one at the bow and one at the stern, and from a small central shell-shaped basin.
Who actually carved it
Here is something the quick guides skip: the Barcaccia is not by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, or at least not by him alone.
The work is by Pietro Bernini (1562-1629), his father, who in 1623 had been appointed architect of the Acqua Vergine and therefore held technical responsibility for the fountains fed by that aqueduct. Work took place between 1626 and 1629, and Pietro died in the very year the fountain was completed.
The Sovrintendenza Capitolina, which is the most cautious source on the matter, writes that the son’s collaboration cannot be ruled out. Gian Lorenzo was then just under thirty, had been working beside his father for a decade and was in those same years receiving the commissions that would make him the artist of Rome.
So the honest formula is this: the Barcaccia is by Pietro Bernini, perhaps with his son’s hand in it, and belongs to the family rather than to the individual. If you are looking for the mature, recognisable Gian Lorenzo, he is two kilometres from here, in the Triton Fountain and the Fountain of the Four Rivers.
At both ends of the boat are the Barberini bees, the coat of arms of Urban VIII, together with the same family’s heraldic suns. They are the same bees you find, in miniature, in the Bee Fountain in Piazza Barberini.
The legend of the Tiber flood
The story you will hear in the square is that in 1598 a great flood of the Tiber swamped Rome as far as here, and that when the water withdrew a boat was left stranded in the middle of the square. Urban VIII is said to have wanted it commemorated with a fountain.
The 1598 flood really happened, and it was one of the worst in Rome’s history. The stranded boat in Piazza di Spagna, on the other hand, does not appear in the monument’s official sources: the Sovrintendenza page does not mention it and explains the shape through the sculptural choice and the pressure problem.
I happily keep it as a legend, which in Rome is worth as much as a document, but not as history. The hydraulic explanation has the advantage of being true and of saying something more interesting about the craft of designing fountains in the seventeenth century.
The name, on the other hand, holds no mystery: barcaccia is the derogatory term for a battered cargo boat, like those that came up the Tiber. The name is not noble and the fountain does not pretend to be either.
2015 and the damage you can still see
The Barcaccia had just come out of a restoration lasting about a year, completed in 2014, when on 19 February 2015 it was wrecked by Dutch supporters of Feyenoord, in town for a Europa League match. The damage report counted more than a hundred chips and cracks in the travertine.
It is soft, porous travertine, and the chips cannot be rebuilt: they are consolidated and they stay. Go up to the edge and look at the rim of the basin in raking light and you can still see them.
In April 2025 a new round of extraordinary maintenance was completed, within the PNRR Caput Mundi programme that covered five monumental Roman fountains. Surfaces were cleaned, biological patinas treated, metal elements protected and the basins re-waterproofed.
Note: the Barcaccia has no recirculation system and the water running in the central shell comes from the Acqua Vergine. To drink or fill a bottle, use the nasoni, the public drinking fountains meant for that purpose. Climbing on the rim, sitting on the basin or getting into the water is forbidden.
What to look at nearby, in five minutes
The square reads badly if you stand still in front of the fountain.
On the right as you face the steps is the Keats-Shelley House, where the English poet died of tuberculosis in 1821, now a museum. A few steps away, on Via dei Condotti, is the Antico Caffè Greco, open since 1760.
At the far end of the square, to the south, the Column of the Immaculate Conception is honoured every 8 December by the fire brigade, who go up on a ladder truck to lay a wreath on the Madonna’s arm. It is one of the finest Roman scenes of the year.
And the staircase, which is eighteenth-century and has nothing to do with Bernini, leads in ten minutes to the Pincio and the entrance to Villa Borghese.
Practical information
Checked on 28 August 2026 on the page of the Sovrintendenza Capitolina and on the Roma Capitale website. Access rules depend on municipal ordinances that change: read the signs in the square.
Tickets. The fountain is in a public square and is free to see.
Opening hours. Piazza di Spagna is always accessible.
Rules worth knowing. Since 2019 the urban police regulations have forbidden sitting and lying down on the Spanish Steps, and sitting, lying down, climbing on or bathing in the fountains. Fines are set by ordinance and are updated, so it is worth reading the amount on the posted sign rather than trusting a figure found online. Municipal police watch the square all day and are quick to intervene.
Getting there. The Spagna stop on metro line A comes out fifty metres from the fountain. On foot it is ten minutes from the Trevi Fountain and fifteen from Piazza del Popolo along Via del Babuino.
How long. Ten minutes are enough for the fountain. With the climb up the steps and the terrace of Trinità dei Monti, allow an hour.
When to go. Between 10.00 and 20.00 the square is packed and there is always a queue around the basin. Before 8.00 it is almost deserted, and with the sun low the travertine of the boat turns golden.
Going up the steps and across the Pincio you reach Villa Borghese, where the Galleria Borghese holds Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s four youthful masterpieces, from Apollo and Daphne to the Rape of Proserpina. Entry is timed and sells out weeks ahead, so it is worth booking the ticket before you travel.
What to see nearby
The Barcaccia is a good opening for a tour dedicated to the water of Rome: you will find it as the first stop in the guide to Bernini’s fountains in Rome, together with the Trevi Fountain, which takes its name and its flow from the same aqueduct.
If you want to understand who the Barberini were, their bees are everywhere: at Palazzo Barberini, on the Triton Fountain and on the Bee Fountain.
For the wider picture of the family’s artist there are the ten works by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and to plan your visit the three-day Rome itinerary.
Photo credits. Bow of the fountain: Jerzy Strzelecki, CC BY-SA 3.0. Damage of 2015: Daniele Brundu, CC BY 4.0. View of the square: Ank Kumar, CC BY-SA 4.0. All from Wikimedia Commons. The cover photograph is the author’s own.
