Fendi Unveils Restored Fountains
The four Rome fountains are all part of the Fendi for Fountains initiative, first announced in 2013.
MILAN — After almost a year of work, Fendi on Tuesday unveiled the four fountains the luxury fashion and accessories house had pledged to restore back in 2016.
The fountains of Acqua Paola at the Gianicolo, also known as the Fontanone and recently seen in the Academy Award-winning film “The Great Beauty”; the Mosè in Piazza San Bernardo; the Peschiera in Piazzale degli Eroi, and the new Acqua Vergine at the Pincian
Hill were reopened in the presence of the mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi; the chairman and chief executive officer of Fendi, Serge Brunschwig, and Rome’s Superintendent of Cultural Heritage, Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli.
The overall cost of the project totaled 280,000 euros.
They are all part of the Fendi for Fountains initiative, whose acronym is a wink to the famous “FF” logo the late Karl Lagerfeld designed in 1965.
The logo has represented an important communications tool for the brand, which is strongly linked to Rome and its magnificent artistic and cultural patrimony. In 1980, the Fendi sisters published a book devoted to the fountains of Rome, sharing their impressions of the structures’ historical and artistic import.
The first Fendi for Fountains project was unveiled in January 2013, under the lead of then-ceo Pietro Beccari and Silvia Venturini Fendi. The landmarks were photographed that year by Lagerfeld for the project titled “The Glory of Water.” The company spent 2.18 million euros on the restoration of the Trevi Fountain.
Fendi supported the restoration of the Baroque Trevi Fountain, a Roman fixture in countless movies, but perhaps most famously seen in “Roman Holiday” and Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” which was newly unveiled in 2015, and served as the stage, for the first time, for a fashion show that marked the brand’s 90th anniversary in 2016. That same year, Fendi said it would restore the other four fountains.
Expressing his pride in a “renewed collaboration between public and private sectors” that has allowed the fountains to return to “their original splendor,” Brunschwig enthused about the fountains being “accessible again to the Romans and to the tourists from the whole word. Rome is an integral part of the Fendi DNA and its artistic and cultural heritage is to be preserved for future generations.”
Executives and entrepreneurs at
Italian luxury houses have been actively supporting the restoration of the country’s landmarks. Examples include Tod’s chief Diego Della Valle, who in 2010 pledged 25 million euros toward restoration work on Rome’s Colosseum and Diesel’s Renzo Rosso, who earmarked 5.5 million euros to restore the most famous bridge in Venice, the 16th-century Ponte di Rialto, through his holding OTB. After two years of work and a total investment of 1.5 million euros, Salvatore Ferragamo in March unveiled the restored Fountain of Neptune in central Florence and the Ferragamo family over the years helped restore eight rooms at the Uffizi Gallery, the allegorical statues on Ponte Santa Trinita, and the Column of Justice in the same square. Meanwhile, Gucci has turned to the botanical world for restoration projects, contributing 2 million euros to the renovation of the historic Boboli Gardens, also sponsored by the city of Florence and the Uffizi Gallery. Earlier this year, Gucci said it would contribute 1.6 million euros over two years to the restoration and conservation of Rome’s Belvedere Garden at Villa Tarpea, and reorganization of the green area landscape located on the tufa rock of the Capitoline Hill. In May, it held its resort show at the nearby Capitoline Museums.