Boat Fountain
Piazza di Spagna, Roma, Italia, Square of Spain, Rome, Italy
Description:
The Boat Fountain was built by order of Pope Urban VIII in 1627-1629 in memory of the flood in Rome in 1598, when the level of the Tiber River rose to 10 meters. The area of Italy at that time was flooded by one meter, and the area could only be moved by boat. When the water left the city, one of the boats ran aground and remained lying on the square.
The fountain was designed by Italian sculptor Pietro Bernini, father of the more famous sculptor Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, who allegedly took part in the work on the fountain after the death of his father in 1629.
The greatest difficulty in the work of the sculptors was that the water supplying the fountain and entering it from the ancient Roman aqueduct Aqua Virgo, had a very low pressure. Pietro Bernini, using his genius and non-standard artistic vision, designed the fountain so that the main part of it (the oval bath) is just below the square level, and the “boat” itself is above this level and at one end is drowned in a bath. This made it possible to create the necessary height drop for the jets.