There is a number that recurs so often in L’Aquila as to become suspicious. The city is said to have been born from the union of ninety-nine castles, to have had ninety-nine squares and ninety-nine churches, and every evening the bell of the civic tower in piazza Palazzo strikes ninety-nine times at sunset.
The place where that number can actually be counted, one by one, lies in the lower part of town, in Borgo Rivera: the fountain of the 99 spouts, of 1272, where ninety-nine jets of water come out of a wall faced with pink and white chequers.
Two things make it more interesting than the photograph suggests. The first is that it is not a fountain, in the sense the ones in Rome are: it is an enclosed courtyard. The second is that nobody knows where the water comes from, and not out of ignorance: because it was decided not to say.
Admission is free, it can be visited at any hour, and it was one of the first monuments in L’Aquila to be made whole again after the earthquake, in December 2010.
What it actually is: a courtyard, not a fountain
The first surprise comes at the gate. You walk down a ramp, pass between two wrought-iron gates in a quatrefoil pattern, and find yourself inside an enclosed, gently sloping space, with walls on two sides meeting at an angle and open sky above.
The walls are faced with alternating white and pink blocks in a chequer pattern, the same facing as the front of the basilica of Collemaggio, which stands a little over a kilometre from here. It is the signature of medieval Abruzzese architecture, and it is why these two monuments, which have nothing in common in function, look as though they came from the same hand.
Along the foot of the walls runs a long channel basin, and the floor of the courtyard is paved. Behind, at the far end, you can see the mountains. It is a domestic and a monumental place at once, which is a rare combination: you only grasp it by going in.
Ninety-three masks and six spouts: how you get to 99
The count is more interesting than the total, because the ninety-nine jets are not ninety-nine heads.
They are ninety-three stone masks plus six plain spouts, with no face. And the masks are all different: human heads, lions’ muzzles, grotesque faces, young faces and bearded ones, some worn down until the features are gone, others intact. Between one and the next run carved panels with rosettes and coats of arms.
Stand at the end of the long wall and look along it, as in the photograph: the row shrinks towards the far end and the jets become a series of parallel lines. It is the point from which the fountain has been portrayed for seven centuries, and it still works.
Then go closer and look at three or four of them one by one. There is no repeated model: every head is its own piece, and in a thirteenth-century monument that means several stonecutters worked on it, at different times.
The legend of the 99 castles, and how much of it holds
Why ninety-nine and not a hundred? Tradition answers that the jets stand for the castles, the fortified villages of the countryside, which came together in the thirteenth century to found the city: each is said to have contributed its own spout, its own square and its own church.
It is a fine story and it has a true basis: L’Aquila really was born from a pact between communities of the territory, with a definitive foundation dated to 1254, and this way of coming into being, by federation rather than by growth, explains the city’s plan of quarters.
What scholars correct is the number. The centres that actually took part were somewhat fewer than ninety-nine, and the round figure came later, as a symbol. If you wonder why ninety-nine rather than the exact number, the soundest answer is that ninety-nine is the number one short of a hundred: it says «all, or nearly» in a form that sticks.
What is worth knowing, in any case, is that the number became the city’s identity. This is not folklore for tourists: the bell of the civic tower strikes it every evening, and the public clock on that tower, installed in 1374, was the first in the Kingdom of Naples.
The secret that was never revealed
Where does the water come from? This is the question that makes the fountain a small case, because the answer is not public.
The spring that feeds the ninety-nine jets was deliberately kept secret, and the reason was practical: in a city born from a pact between ninety-nine communities, knowing on whose land the water rose would have opened a dispute over patronage that nobody wanted. By keeping the name out of the records, they kept the water everyone’s.
The most widely accepted hypothesis places it not far away, towards the church of Santa Chiara, on the north-east side of Rivera, but officially the location remains undeclared. The water still arrives, steady and cold, and that is as much as can be said with certainty.
Careful: the fountain water is not drinkable. There is a historical irony in that, because the fountain was built to celebrate the arrival of drinking water in the city: today, look at it and listen to it, but do not fill your bottle.
How it grew, and the wash house that worked around it
The monument you see is not of a single moment, and that is why the masks do not resemble one another. The phases are these, and they can be read on the walls.
The main front is of 1272 and carries the signature of the master Tancredi da Pentima: on the wall facing the gate is the plaque reading ANNO DOMINI MCCLXXII MAGISTER TANCREDUS DE PENTOMA DE VALVA FECIT HOC OPUS. The fountain was built for a precise reason, to celebrate the completion of the aqueduct of Amiternum, which had just brought drinking water into the city, and Amiternum is also the archaeological site that today belongs to the national museum of Abruzzo. The left side was added in 1582 by Alessandro Ciccarone, and the right side was rebuilt in the eighteenth century after the earthquake of 1703 had damaged it. Documented restorations follow in 1744 and 1871. Six hundred years separate the first work from the last, and the chequered facing is what holds them together.
Then there is a part of the story that is not architectural and that explains the shape of the place. The basins sit on five different levels, and this is no scenic conceit: they served to separate uses. Clean water at the top level for drinking and for animals, the levels below for washing clothes. Until the early twentieth century this courtyard was the public wash house of L’Aquila, the place where the women of the quarter spent their mornings.
When you cross it, then, you are crossing a place of work. That is why the pavement is broad and sloping, and why the rims of the basins are worn smooth.
2009, and the first restoration to be finished
The earthquake of 6 April 2009 treated this fountain better than the rest of the city: the damage was limited, concentrated mainly on the right-hand front, the eighteenth-century part.
The restoration was funded by the FAI, the Italian environment fund, and was completed on 16 December 2010. The date matters: in December 2010, when almost the whole old town was a red zone and the city had not yet had a single monument handed back, the 99 spouts became the first monument in L’Aquila to be returned intact.
To grasp what that meant you need only compare it with the other buildings in this guide: Collemaggio reopened in 2017, the MAXXI in 2021, the national museum in the castle in December 2025. The fountain had come back fifteen years before the last of them.
Practical information
Details checked on 7 September 2026 on the Abruzzo region’s cultural portal records and on the FAI documentation of the restoration. The fountain is an open-air monument and access conditions can change for works: if you are coming from far away, check.
Admission. Admission is free, and there is no ticket office.
Opening hours. The courtyard is accessible during the day and has no declared closing time or rest day. The best light for photographing it is early afternoon, when it falls into the courtyard rather than onto the walls.
Getting there. The fountain is in piazza San Vito, in the Borgo Rivera quarter, in the lower part of town just outside the historic walls. From the centre it is a ten-minute walk down; the way back is all uphill, and that is the only practical warning needed. The last stretch and the courtyard have steps and a sloping floor.
What is nearby. A couple of minutes away stands the former slaughterhouse in via Pentima, which housed the national museum of Abruzzo for sixteen years and still holds its archaeological section, open only on the museum’s special visits. A little above, the church of San Vito and the Rivera gate.
How long it takes. Twenty minutes is enough. Thirty, if you start looking at the masks one by one, which is the right way to be here.
Why walk down to Borgo Rivera
The 99 spouts are the monument in L’Aquila that photographs least well and is remembered most. The reason is that it does not work as an overall view, which is nearly impossible, but as the sum of two things that come together only here: a number that is a city’s identity and water whose origin is unknown.
And there is a practical reason to schedule it after the museums rather than before. After an hour and a half inside the castle, walking down to an open courtyard where the only sound is water puts the day back in order.
How to fit it into the two days is explained in the guide on what to see in L’Aquila; the other monument with the same chequered facing is the basilica of Collemaggio, and the basilica of San Bernardino is the church you come down from.
Photographs: the corner of the fountain by Maurizio Moro5153, the row of masks by Giu Pepis, the courtyard and the detail of the masks by Albrizio Iolanda, all CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons.
