THEUNSTABLELEMENT
a place for travel, culture and life stories
STORY TIME: The Fontana di Trevi incident.
Throwback to a good ten years ago (God, I feel old). Italy. Rome. The Trevi Fountain. Nice right?
Picture me and my parents, happily enjoying the sunny day as we stroll through the Roman alleyways in the direction of the Trevi Fountain. It’s not my first time in Rome – I have been here a few times and kind of know my way around already, but the fountain is something I have maybe only seen once before, and too briefly to remember it well.
As we approach the monument, we find ourselves crushed by the crowd of tourists enveloping the fountain, gasping for air as we squeeze through and try to get closer. Keep in mind that the fountain isn’t as I’ve seen it recently, you can actually get right next to the water without the barricades I saw the last time I was in Rome, preventing you from even going at arm-length distance with it. So we decide to get closer, in order to admire it from a better angle and get away from all the cameras flying around.
As you may know, the Fontana di Trevi is also famous because of all the coins constellating its floor, as people use this little trick to make a wish and hope it will come true. As a young person at the time (who am I kidding? Even now), I am completely enthralled by all the shiny objects sparkling below the surface of the water, eagerly rummaging through my bag to find a small coin to throw in, together with my coveted wish.
Now you need to know here that I am quite a superstitious person. I like to blame this on my southern roots, but it’s probably just my poor mental health, leading me on through life as I fear for any scaffolding or black cat coming across my way. Either way, this means that the excitement for the wish-making activity ahead of me is growing stronger by the second, as I think hard of something worth spending that important 1-cent coin on.
Once I have decided, boom.
I turn around.
Close my eyes.
Think about the wish as strong as I can.
Throw the coin in.
And then the magic happens.
Then I hear a loud splash.
And the confusion starts.
“A small coin can’t be that noisy”, I think as I turn around. Now this is the part where I explain the side note: as it happens, in that period I had taken the habit of always storing my mobile phone up my sleeve. It was simple, fast and a very easy reach whenever I needed it. Not to mention a good hiding place for wanna-be thieves on the street. In short, the perfect hiding place.
Well my friends, as you may now imagine, this hiding place turned out to not be as perfect as I thought. Especially when you’re using all your arm strength to throw a coin as far as possible. And the phone flies out with it.
Into the fountain.
Fast forward to about 10 seconds of panic, and I am now anxiously trying to convince a policeman to let me go into the water to save my beautiful phone. As you can probably guess, the answer is no. The Trevi Fountain is a historical site and as such, people are not allowed into it, which is good for Rome and bad for my now dying phone. After 5 minutes of discussing and being told that I will have to wait until the fountain gets cleaned ( which is gonna happen hours later ) in order to get it back, I decide I need a back-up plan. My mother and I then proceed to look for something long enough to reach the phone and somehow push it towards the side, where we can easily get it.
Alas, nothing is available and the anxiety is growing, as Japanese tourists and casual passerby’s start noticing the situation and taking photos of my drowned phone (I like to think that somewhere, out there, there are photos of my phone and people still look at them and laugh).
At last, a light shines through. We march into one of the shops and ask for something long to use in our mission, but the shop keeper has none. However, he quickly becomes invested in the tragedy and decides he wants to help us. He runs to the back of the shop and, after a few minutes of rummaging through stuff, finally comes back with two small brooms and tape. Motivated by the cause, he quickly gets to work and tapes the two brooms together, then hands us the finalised product and wishes us the best of luck.
At this point, the situation is quite ridiculous: a shop keeper just fabricated an ax-like weapon, the police is looking at us as if we’re insane, people are taking photos, my phone is probably dead and my father is nowhere to be found. We get to the fountain, check where the phone is and get ready for the plan to take off, when yet another obstacle in this endless story arises: both my mum and I are short as fuck, which means that even our weapon isn’t long enough to save the phone. We look around, exasperated and tired, when the hero of the situation steps in: a man offers to help, takes the reins of the situation and, after a few tries, finally manages to push the stupid thing close enough for us to reach it with our hands and finally bring it back to safety.
After the whole ordeal, the square is now in an amused frenzy, my father is still nowhere to be found (where was he?? I can’t even remember) and my mum is emotionally exhausted.
Yet, the most amazing thing about the whole story is yet to come: I pick up my phone, give out a small scream of joy which is quickly substituted by the knowledge that it’s probably dead by now, then inadvertently push the “turn on” button out of habit. And guess what?
THE PHONE WORKS.
As always, thank you guys for reading and I hope you’re having a great day! If you like the blog or would like to read more, feel free to click the follow button in the sidebar – left side of the page! 🙂
Elena
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This blog post was NOT sponsored by Nokia, however they do deserve a shoutout because only they know how a fucking phone can endure this physical strain. Kudos to you guys.
Hi! My nickname is Nana. You can call me Nina. The real one is neither of those two.
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