Nicola Salvi

Nicola Salvi designed the Trevi Fountain and died with it unfinished. The project had been proposed for over a century: the Acqua Vergine, the aqueduct Agrippa built in 19 BC and the only one to run continuously through the middle ages, ended at that junction of streets, and popes from Urban VIII onwards had commissioned schemes for a display fountain there. Bernini prepared one that was abandoned when Urban died. Clement XII held a competition in 1730, awarded it to a Florentine, and gave it to Salvi instead after Roman objections; Salvi was thirty-three and almost unknown. What he produced treats the whole facade of the Palazzo Poli as the back wall of the fountain, so that the architecture and the water are a single composition, with Ocean in the central niche driven by tritons and sea horses over a reef of travertine that dissolves the boundary between the built and the natural. It is the last great work of Roman Baroque and it was built when the style was already out of fashion elsewhere. The work took thirty years and cost enough to be funded partly by a public lottery. Salvi died in 1751 with the sculpture incomplete; Giuseppe Pannini finished it and it was inaugurated in 1762. He built little else of consequence and is remembered for this alone. Coins thrown into it are collected daily and given to a Catholic charity, and amount to well over a million euros a year. He also worked on the facade of Santa Maria in Gradi at Viterbo and consulted on the competition for the Trevi s rival project at Piazza di Spagna. The fountain was drained and cleaned for the first full restoration in 1998.

• Lived: 1697 CE – 1751 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: architect