Rome’s fountains run into the thousands, between monumental ones, neighbourhood ones and nasoni, and at a certain point in a visit they all start to look alike: white stone, water, a sculpture in the middle.
Then you look properly at one by Bernini and the confusion stops.
The difference is that he never treated a fountain as a container of water to be decorated. For him it was a scene, with characters doing something: a triton blowing into a conch, a boat going down, four giants surprised by an obelisk. The water is not an accessory, it is what moves the scene.
This guide lines up the Roman fountains that can be attributed to Bernini, says what to look at in each, and closes with the walking route that links them in half a day. I have kept the uncertain attributions too, because pretending they are all from his own hand would be convenient and false.
Let us start with the count, which is shorter than you would expect.
How many of Bernini’s fountains there really are
Search online and you will find lists ranging from three to ten. The whole difference lies in what you accept as “by Bernini”, because in the seventeenth century an artist of that standing ran a workshop and signed designs that others carved.
There are three distinct categories, and it helps to keep them apart.
Designed and directed by him are the Triton, the Bees and the Four Rivers. Here the design is his and so is the direction of the work, even when collaborators handle the marble.
Partly his are the Moor in Piazza Navona, where Bernini reworked the central group of an existing sixteenth-century fountain, and the two basins in St Peter’s Square, where the layout of the square is his but the authorship of the second is disputed.
A family affair is the Barcaccia, the work of his father Pietro Bernini with a possible contribution from his twenty-eight-year-old son.
That makes six stops inside Rome, plus one outside the city. There are not many, and you can walk them all in one morning.
1 – The Barcaccia, Piazza di Spagna (1626-1629)
It is the oldest of the group and the least Bernini-like in the usual sense, because the signature is the father’s.
The Acqua Vergine arrived here at very low pressure, and a jet fountain would have looked ridiculous. Pietro Bernini turned the problem on its head: he sank the basin below street level and gave it the shape of a half-sunken boat, with the water spilling over the sides instead of rising.
What to look at. The water comes out of the two large heraldic suns, one at bow and one at stern, and the Barberini bees sit at each end of the boat. Then look at the rim of the basin in raking light: the chips from 2015 are still there.
I have written about it at length in the article on the Barcaccia Fountain.
2 – The Triton Fountain, Piazza Barberini (1642-1643)
This is the piece that changes the history of Roman fountains, and the one fewest people stop in front of.
Until then Rome’s public fountains had been basins with some decoration. Here Bernini brings to the square a free-standing sculptural fountain, with no architectural backdrop, meant to be seen from every side: four dolphins hold up a large open bivalve shell, and above it kneels a triton blowing into a conch from which the jet emerges.
What to look at. The way the vertical jet continues the line of the triton’s body, so the water seems part of the statue. And the dolphins’ tails intertwined with the papal coat of arms, which is the trick by which Bernini carries the entire weight on four points.
The full story is in the article on the Triton Fountain, which remains his most underrated public work.
3 – The Bee Fountain, corner of Via Veneto (1644)
It stands a hundred metres from the Triton, and it is connected to the larger fountain hydraulically too, because it collected its waste water.
It began as a horse trough: a shell opened halfway, the lower valve serving as the basin and the upper one carrying the inscription and the three Barberini bees.
What to look at. The piece to seek out is the inscription. Bernini cut into it the twenty-second year of Urban VIII’s pontificate when two months of the twenty-first still remained, the Romans read it as an ill omen, the cardinal nephew had the last I scraped off, and the pope died eight days before that year began. The trace of the erasure is still visible.
I have told the whole story, including the fact that what you see is a 1916 reconstruction, in the article on the Bee Fountain.
4 – The Fountain of the Four Rivers, Piazza Navona (1648-1651)
This is the masterpiece, and the only one of his fountains everybody recognises.
Four marble colossi represent the four continents then known, seated on a travertine crag pierced right through, and above them an obelisk of more than sixteen metres rests on that void. Bernini got the commission without having been invited to the competition, by having a silver model reach the pope.
What to look at. Go round to the side facing the Corsia Agonale and study the openings in the rock, which are the technical reason the fountain exists in this shape. Then look for the Nile with its veiled head, which is covered not to avoid seeing Borromini’s church (that arrives two years later) but because in the seventeenth century nobody knew where that river rose.
Statue by statue, the full account is in the article on the Fountain of the Four Rivers.
5 – The Moor Fountain, Piazza Navona (1653-1655)
It stands in the same square, on the south side, and almost nobody connects it to Bernini.
The basin had been there since 1575, designed by Giacomo della Porta with four tritons and masks. In 1653 Innocent X asked Bernini to take it in hand again, and he set the group of the Moor at the centre: an African figure wrestling a dolphin, twisting on the diagonal. The marble was carved by Giovanni Antonio Mari to his model.
What to look at. The twist of the body is Bernini’s signature and clashes deliberately with the sixteenth-century symmetry of the basin around it. Bear in mind, though, that all the statues you see are copies: in 1874 the originals were moved to Villa Borghese and replaced with replicas by Luigi Amici.
6 – The twin fountains of St Peter’s Square (1614, 1667 and 1677)
They look like two peas in a pod and they were not born together, and this is the piece of history almost nobody tells.
The one on the right, looking at the basilica from Via della Conciliazione, is the older: in 1614 Carlo Maderno reworked its structure. In 1667 Bernini took it apart and put it back together a few metres away, to line it up with the square’s new axis and make it one of the two foci of the ellipse.
The twin on the left was commissioned by Clement X and was inaugurated on 28 June 1677. It follows the right-hand one fairly faithfully, with different papal coats of arms. The actual execution is by Carlo Fontana, who nonetheless wrote in his 1696 treatise that the order had been given for Bernini to design the fountain: authorship remains an open question, while there is no doubt that the symmetry is part of Bernini’s design for the square.
The inauguration came late for a practical reason. There was not enough pressure to feed two fountains, and the problem was only solved when the pope bought from Flavio Orsini, at a steep price, a further share of the water of Lake Bracciano. From then on the jets reached eight metres, as tall as the fountains themselves, and were only reduced in the twentieth century, with the restoration under Paul VI that also introduced recirculation.
What to look at. Stand on one of the two porphyry discs set into the paving, between the obelisk and each fountain. From there the four rows of columns in the colonnade line up perfectly and you see only one. It is the point where you understand that the fountains are there to define the geometry of the square, not to decorate it.
The Trevi Fountain that Bernini did not build
It is worth knowing, because it explains the orientation of the Trevi Fountain.
Around 1640 Urban VIII commissioned Bernini to rebuild the old outlet of the Acqua Vergine. Bernini enlarged the square by demolishing a few small buildings and, above all, rotated the fountain through ninety degrees, turning it towards the Quirinal Palace, which is to say towards the pope. Little more than the basin and a base hemicycle was built.
Then the pope died in 1644, the Barberini family was put on trial, Bernini fell from favour and the project was abandoned. Nearly ninety years would pass before Nicola Salvi built, from 1732, the fountain we know.
Salvi did inherit the layout, though: the orientation of the Trevi Fountain, the reason the crag faces the Quirinal rather than the opposite side of the square, is a decision of Bernini’s. The rest I tell in the article on the Trevi Fountain.
The Bicchierone at Villa d’Este, outside Rome
If you have an extra day and go as far as Tivoli, at Villa d’Este there is Bernini’s last fountain in chronological order.
The Fontana del Bicchierone was made between 1660 and 1661 for Cardinal Rinaldo d’Este and inaugurated in May 1661. The name comes from its goblet shape: a large shell from which something like a pearl emerges, with the water falling as a sheet. Bernini was sixty-two and working with poor materials, brick and stucco later faced with stone and ancient marbles.
It is a late, experimental piece, and at Villa d’Este it sits below the cardinal’s loggia, along the Vialone.
The walking route, in half a day
The six Roman stops fall into three groups close to one another, and this is the order that works.
First part, the Barberini quarter. Start at the Barcaccia in Piazza di Spagna, fifty metres from the metro exit. From there reach Piazza Barberini in a ten-minute walk, via Via Propaganda and Via di San Basilio: the Triton is at the centre of the square and the Bees are a hundred metres away, at the mouth of Via Veneto. From here it is ten minutes downhill to the Trevi Fountain.
Second part, the historic centre. From Trevi walk twenty minutes west, passing the Pantheon, and you reach Piazza Navona, where within fifty metres you have the Four Rivers and the Moor.
Third part, the Vatican. From Piazza Navona it is a twenty-minute walk along Corso Vittorio and Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II to St Peter’s Square, with the two twin fountains.
The complete route is about five kilometres, all flat except the climb to Piazza Barberini, and with stops it asks for four hours. Doing it early changes the experience: at 8.00 the Barcaccia and Piazza Navona are almost deserted.
Note: in summer bring a bottle. The nasoni you pass along the way give drinking water, and it comes from the same aqueduct that feeds the fountains you are looking at.
Practical information
Checked on 28 August 2026 on the records of the Sovrintendenza Capitolina. Access rules for monumental fountains depend on municipal ordinances that change over time.
Tickets. Every fountain on this route is on public ground and free to see. There is nothing to book.
Opening hours. The squares are always accessible. St Peter’s Square closes for events and celebrations, and at the entrance there is a security check with metal detectors that means a queue in the middle of the day.
Rules worth knowing. The urban police regulations forbid sitting, lying down or climbing on monumental fountains and bathing in them; on the Spanish Steps sitting on the steps is forbidden as well. Fines are set by ordinance and updated, so read the amount on the sign posted on site rather than trusting a figure found online.
Getting around. Metro line A serves three of the six stops: Spagna for the Barcaccia, Barberini for the Triton and the Bees, Ottaviano for St Peter’s. Piazza Navona has no metro and is reached by buses 64 and 87 on Corso Vittorio Emanuele.
How long. Counting stops and walking, the full route takes four hours. Drop St Peter’s Square and you are down to two and a half.
The Barcaccia and the Four Rivers grew out of the network of the Acqua Vergine, the aqueduct of 19 BC that still runs beneath the centre of Rome; the Triton and the Bees out of the Acqua Felice, and the two twins in St Peter’s Square out of the Acqua Paola, which brings water from Lake Bracciano. A stretch of the Acqua Vergine can be visited beneath the Trevi Fountain, in the archaeological site of the Vicus Caprarius: if you want to see where part of the water you have followed all day comes from, you can book the Water City visit.
What to see nearby
This route fits well with the three-day Rome itinerary, which passes through the same squares, and with the selection of museums in Rome if you want to alternate outdoors and indoors.
For Bernini the sculptor, the place is the Galleria Borghese, home to Apollo and Daphne and the Rape of Proserpina, and the overall picture is in the ten works by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The rivalry that produced half of baroque Rome is told in the article on Bernini and Borromini.
If the fountains have caught you, the Fountain of the Naiads in Piazza della Repubblica is two hundred and fifty years later and caused a far bigger scandal than anything Bernini ever did.
Photo credits. Detail of the Fountain of the Four Rivers: Timothy A. Gonsalves, CC BY-SA 4.0. Moor Fountain: Meghan Klemm, CC BY-SA 4.0. Both from Wikimedia Commons. The other photographs are the author’s own.
