In case you haven’t noticed, tourism has been up since the end of pandemic. Way, way up.
I’m not sure whether a year of forced isolated unlocked the free spirit in the staycation crowd or whether lots of people have simply decided to visit places they always wanted to see before something else bad happens. But whatever the reason, they’re out there in full force, buddy. If you don’t believe me, plan an in-season visit to one of your favorite national parks.
My latest experience with this came in one of the world’s top vacation spots – Rome, Italy – at an attraction that you wouldn’t think would be all that affected by this – the Trevi Fountain.
If you’ve never seen Anita Ekberg’s frolic in the Trevi Fountain in Frederico Fellini’s 1960 movie La Dolce Vita, I humbly suggest that you watch a clip of it on YouTube before you visit the Roman capital for the first time. It will make you wish you gotten there on the other side of the pandemic.
The buxom, blonde Swedish-born actress climbs into the fountain wearing a low-cut evening gown, dances softly before the statues designed by Italian architect Nicola Salvi and completed by Giuseppe Pannini in 1762. Performing as Sylvia Rank, the unattainable “dream woman” of the character played by Marcello Mastroianni, she beckons him to join her in the water, which he does in a romantic scene that is one of the iconic moments in motion picture history. They are the only people there.
Times have changed. We were in Rome two weeks ago and the fountain was one of the many stops we made. The fountain is now protected by a fence, presumably to keep Ekberg wannabes from using the pool as their favorite Roman swimming hole, although that doesn’t address the biggest problem: the sheer volume of people who want to take selfies of themselves in front of it.
In Rome, the problem is by no means confined to the area in front of the fountain – we knew there would be huge crowds at the Colosseum and the Vatican, for example — but this is where you discover that this tourism thing has somehow gotten out of whack. The Trevi Fountain seems like a place where you could walk near the edge of the water, look at the beautiful statues for a few moments, snap a photo or two and move on.
It isn’t. It reminds you of one of those photos of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange decades ago before the world turned electronic, where traders are all frantically trying to buy and sell at the same time. The crowd jostling to get a place to take the perfect selfie is 10 or 12 deep in some places, with more people pushing their way into this mass of humanity at evert moment. Many of them show no sign that they even know that there is a fountain back there. It isn’t about the fountain. It’s about them.
Again, I don’t know how or why all of this came about, but being locked away in our houses trying to avoid human contact that might give us the virus seems to have changed something. Before that period of isolation, snapping selfies in famous places and posting them on social media apparently didn’t seem quite so important.
After I told some friends of ours about the crush of selfie-snappers at the fountain during our visit there, they produced a photo of themselves in front of the Trevi Fountain in 2017, and they were standing there with no one near them. One of them gasped when I showed her a photo of the crowd there today.
From the Trevi Fountain, it’s a short walk to the Spanish Steps, another favorite stopping spot for tourists in Rome. Again, the area in front of the steps was a mob scene, although it was considerably smaller than the one at the fountain.
The steps were built in Rococo style between 1723 and 1726 and lead from the Piazza di Spagna square to the French monastery church Trinita dei Monti, which was built between 1502 and 1587. There are 135 steps and three different terraces, and in the 17th century, the Spanish embassy was located on the square.
It is another place that should remind you that history and art are everywhere in Rome. Instead, we soon found ourselves focusing on a young Japanese woman. She stood on the steps a short distance away from us and snapped one selfie of another of herself in a wide variety of poses for at least 20 minutes. I’m guessing that in that time period, she took between 500 and 1,000 selfies, and in some cases she simply changed her expression and/or moved no more than one body part or two more than six inches in any direction.
I don’t know whether this quest for perfection was destined to land her a gig as a model for Vogue or simply to provide a shot or two for TikTok or Instagram, but it was clear that the steps were no more than props to her.
Her next appearance is at the Trevi something or other next week.
Another shot of the crowd at the Trevi Fountain
Anita Ekberg in the fountain in a scene from La Dolce Vita
A smaller crowd at the Spanish Steps