Art or Vandalism? Trevi Fountain Waters Turned Red in Rome

Rome had an Andy Warhol moment last week when a baseball-capped art anarchist dumped a bottle of dye into the city’s famed Trevi Fountain and turned its waters blood red for a day, writes Elisabetta Povoledo in The New York Times. Traditionalists who revere Rome’s monuments called it vandalism. Artists who believe Italian culture is stilted and staid called it genius.

Media critic Gianluca Nicoletta called it a “marvelous event” that put Rome in the spotlight “at practically zero cost.” But Anita Ekberg, who dipped in the fountain for the 1960 Fellini classic “La Dolce Vita,” raged that it was “an offense to Rome’s culture.”

Video shows a man, cap pulled low, pouring the dye in the fountain and then running off. Italian news media identified him as Graziano Cecchini, a 54-year-old artist. So Povoledo telephoned him. “If it had been me, wink wink,” he told her, “I’d say that this had been a media-savvy operation in the face of a very gray society.”

 

©2026 World Hum, All Rights Reserved