At the mouth of Via Veneto, set against the wall like an afterthought, there is a travertine shell opened halfway with three bees carved at its base. It fits entirely within the height of a standing person, thousands of passers-by walk past it every day and hardly anyone stops.
This is the Bee Fountain, and it is by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
It is not his finest work and he would not have put it on his own résumé: it began life as a horse trough, a neighbourhood utility. Yet it is the only fountain in Rome to have set off a political scandal because of one letter too many, and which, according to seventeenth-century Romans, foretold the death of the pope who commissioned it.
It is worth the five minutes it asks for.
A drinking trough signed by Bernini
We are in 1644, the last year of the pontificate of Urban VIII Barberini. A few metres away Bernini had just finished the Triton Fountain at the centre of the square.
A monumental fountain like the Triton took care of civic display, not of daily need. A low water point was also required, where horses could drink and passers-by could fill a jug. Bernini drew that water point from the Triton’s overflow, that is from the large fountain’s waste water, and that is where the modest flow the little fountain still has today comes from.
The formal idea is simple and instantly recognisable. A large bivalve shell opening up: the lower valve serves as the basin, the upper one lifts and carries the dedicatory inscription. Where the two valves meet stand the three Barberini bees, the family coat of arms you find all over Rome, from the baldachin of St Peter’s to palace facades.
A trough, then, but designed by the most famous artist in Europe and turned into a piece of sculpture.
The mistake in the inscription, and the prophecy
Here comes the best part.
The inscription carved on the upper valve declares that the pope had the fountain built for public use in the twenty-second year of his pontificate. Except that when the fountain was unveiled, Urban VIII’s twenty-second year was still two months away.
Bernini had run ahead of the date, out of haste or a miscalculation, and he had done it on a public stone, in a city where satire was a daily sport.
The Romans, who already loathed the Barberini for their taxes and for the bronze stripped from the Pantheon, seized the chance. The pasquinades accused the family of wanting to suck up time itself after having sucked up the whole world. And people began to say that the extra letter was a disguised wish: that the pope would not reach that twenty-second year.
Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the pontiff’s nephew, moved to limit the damage and had the last I erased from the inscription, taking the date back to the twenty-first year.
A curious detail: it made no difference. Urban VIII died on 29 July 1644, eight days before the twenty-second year of his pontificate began. In Roman eyes the correction became the proof that the prophecy had got there first.
Go close to the inscription and look at it in raking light and the trace of that erasure is still visible. It is the detail worth stopping for.
What you see is not what Bernini made
This is the part the plaques do not tell you, and it changes how you look at it.
The fountain was born on the corner of Palazzo Soderini, between Piazza Barberini and Via Sistina, which is not where it stands now. In 1865 it was dismantled to make way for traffic and the pieces went into storage, where most of them were lost.
Half a century later the fountain was put back up. The sculptor Adolfo Apolloni took it on and rebuilt it between 1915 and 1916. Without the original to work from he largely remade it from scratch, using travertine salvaged from the demolished Porta Salaria. The reassembled fountain was unveiled on 28 January 1916 in its present position, on the corner between Piazza Barberini and Via Vittorio Veneto.
Of Bernini’s 1644 fountain only a few fragments survive, among them part of the shell and the central bee.
That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to look at it knowing what you are looking at: a faithful early twentieth-century copy, with a few pieces of the original inside it, which preserves Bernini’s idea and the inscription with its scar.
Note: one of the bee heads was torn off in an act of vandalism and replaced with a replica in 2004. The bees you see today are not even all by Apolloni.
How to find it, because it is not easy
The Bee Fountain is set against the wall on the north-east corner of Piazza Barberini, where Via Vittorio Veneto begins, and it sits lower than the street. It has no space around it, no forecourt, and walking past on the pavement it is easily mistaken for a decorative niche.
The simplest way not to miss it is to stand in the middle of Piazza Barberini with the Triton Fountain in front of you, turn your back on the metro entrance and look for the mouth of Via Veneto: the Bee Fountain is on the right of that opening, below pavement level.
The two fountains are less than a hundred metres apart and should be seen together, because they are the same project: the large one and the small one, ceremonial water and utility water, the Triton of 1642-1643 and the Bees of 1644, both for Urban VIII.
Practical information
Checked on 28 August 2026 on the page of the Sovrintendenza Capitolina.
Tickets. The fountain is on public ground and can be seen free of charge, at any hour.
Opening hours. Piazza Barberini is always accessible.
Water. The flow is minimal and at times the jet is reduced or absent for maintenance: the fountain still reads perfectly well, because the interesting piece is the shell with its inscription.
Getting there. The Barberini stop on metro line A comes out directly on the square. From the Trevi Fountain it is a ten-minute walk uphill along Via del Tritone.
How long. Five minutes for the fountain, twenty if you pair it with the Triton and stop to read the inscription.
When to go. The inscription reads best in the afternoon, when the light strikes the wall at an angle; at midday the stone is flat and the erased I disappears.
Palazzo Barberini faces the square, the family residence built by Maderno, Bernini and Borromini, today the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica: inside are Raphael’s Fornarina, Caravaggio’s Narcissus and Judith, and Borromini’s spiral staircase. The ticket is valid for twenty days and includes the Galleria Corsini, and can be booked online.
What to see nearby
The Bee Fountain is the shortest and most easily skipped stop in the guide to Bernini’s fountains in Rome, which lines them all up in a walking route.
A hundred metres away is the Triton Fountain, by the same hand and from the same period, and the square is overlooked by Palazzo Barberini and its artworks. Going down Via del Tritone you reach the Trevi Fountain in ten minutes.
To understand the man who also designed a drinking trough there are the ten works by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the article on Bernini and Borromini, who worked side by side at Palazzo Barberini.
Photo credits. View of the fountain: Girolamus, CC BY-SA 4.0. Detail of the bees: Zorro2212, CC BY-SA 3.0. Both from Wikimedia Commons.
