Fontana Cairoli
Piazza Benedetto Cairoli
Rome Italy
2016

The fountain in Piazza Cairoli, once called Piazza Branca, is situated at the centre of a garden. It was built in 1888 by Ed Andrè, as remembered by an engraving in a corner of the socle. It consists of a quadrangular pond made of granite from Baveno with at the centre a pillar, whose decorations (bronze dauphins around a trident) have gone lost. The pillar supports a circular basin coming from the excavations of 1887 in the nearby Piazza Cenci. Above is a second pillar supporting a basin that pours water.

In the small garden that opens up in front of the Santafiora palace, on the area that was donated to the Municipality by Baron Huffer, one of the few fountains that Rome saw erected between 1870 and the Great War stands in the shade of the palms and plane trees. This fountain, which bears no other inscriptions other than the signature, placed in a corner of the plinth, by Ed. André, is all in gray by Baveno. In the center of a large octagonal basin, spurred on the smaller sides, stands a high pedestal, whose four faces are adorned with bronze dolphins, which wrap themselves around a trident: the monocronising patina of the time has already made these low-lying almost invisible. reliefs applied on the granite background. On the pedestal rests a first circular cup, which supports a second one, raised on its hundred foot. Sober and correct in its lines, this fountain is located at one end of the garden in Piazza Benedetto Cairoli, symmetrically with the monument to Federico Seismit Doda, by Maccagnani, which stands at the other end. Flanked on its widest side by via Arenula with its incessant and noisy tram traffic, the little garden is little frequented and rather melancholy: in fact, it lacks the most important requisites for a public garden, tranquility, ease of access, and a reasonable distance from the hustle and bustle of city life. However, it is always a graceful and relaxing oasis of greenery, a precious reserve of oxygen, a welcome shady refuge offered to the citizens.
The fountain, half hidden by the trees, mimetically confused - in its monotonous gray - with the background of the surrounding buildings, bears the imprint of the time in which it was born: more than a work of art, it seems an act of ordinary administration, bureaucratically outcast.