Crime Continues at the Trevi Fountain

The Trevi Fountain continues to be a crime scene. When I developed the idea for “Feeding Frenzy” (Fish Tales, Wildside Press, March 2011), my inspiration came from a real crime. In my story, it’s fish in the fountain. But before that, in 2007, a man named Graziano Checchino had thrown red dye into the fountain, a fact that I allude to in the story. He reportedly had right wing leanings, and called his act of defiance “futuristic,” referring to the art movement founded in 1909 and championed by Mussolini as the “official art of fascism.” Checchino’s motives are unclear. He may have been protesting the Rome Film Festival (or its cost) or perhaps capitalism in general. There was no damage to the fountain that time, but last year someone repeated the red dye stunt, and some of the marble was termporarily stained.

But crime at the Trevi is not limited to things being put into the fountain. Things are put into the fountain daily in the form of coins tossed by tourists. The custom, popularized by the 1950s film Three Coins in the Fountain, comes from the superstition that if you throw a coin in the fountain you are guaranteed to return to Rome. I’ve certainly pitched in my share. The crime comes from taking the coins out.

About €2000-€3000 worth of coins are flung into the fountain every day. Officially, these coins are collected for a charity. But some enterprising Romans have been harvesting this bounty for themselves. Recently, a television crew set out to document the police standing by while the money was being raked out. A scuffle ensued, and the television reporter ended up tossed into the fountain himself. The police intervened only when the thieves attacked the camera operator.

The main perpetrator of this illegal collection is a man named Roberto Cercelletta, who calls himself D’Artagnan. Italian courts have ruled that the coins have been abandoned by their owners and can therefore not be stolen. D’Artagnan apparently sees collecting these coins on par with picking up empty bottles on the roadside. Last week the police tried to arrest him while he was in the fountain with a broom sweeping up coins because, while it may not be a crime to take the coins, it is a crime to enter Roman fountains.

D’Artagnan resisted, ripping off his shirt and climbing high up onto the fountain. There he slashed his stomach to dramatize his “persecution.” He was last seen being tucked into an ambulance. Stay tuned.

Water, Water Everywhere

Unlike many European cities, Rome has an abundance of water, thanks in large part to the ancient aqueducts. This system was refurbished during the papal reigns beginning in the 1400s. Water is still piped through these acqueducts from springs in surrounding hills. It thunders into some fountains, like the Trevi, and trickles at a modest pace into others like the Barcaccia the foot of the Spanish Steps.
The Trevi, Rome’s most famous, completed in 1762, marks the end of the Acqua Vergine, the aqueduct built by Marcus Agrippa in 19 BC. It’s an amazing structure with water surging with such force that it sounds like a waterfall. In the eighteenth century, people believed that drinking its water ensured your return to Rome. Now, the toss of a coin gives you that guarantee. I threw my first coin in 1969 and never fail to toss in another whenever I leave the city (at least when I leave the country). The proper way to toss a coin is to stand with your back to the fountain and toss it over your shoulder. Famous from the movies, the Trevi is still featured in Italian advertising for bottled water and many other products.
Beyond the Trevi, many other Roman fountains quench the thirst and tickle the imagination. The Water Nymph Fountain in Piazza della Republica near the main train station, for example, features four erotic water nymphs entwined with sea creatures. It caused such a stir when it was unveiled in 1870, that it was covered for a time. Now it’s in the center of a busy traffic circle, and you must make an effort to get a proper look.
The Tortoise Fountain hides in a little secluded piazza where you can rest and smile. The fountain shows young men nudging turtles climbing up and over the fountain’s rim.
The most common fountain is the nasone (big nose), so called because the spout resembles a large nose. Spaced roughly 200 meters apart throughout the city (a designation dating to ancient Rome) these fountains ensure that you are a short walk from fresh water wherever you go.
The utilitarian nasone are fifteen-inch metal cylinders that stand about 4 feet above the ground. The spouts extend about 10 inches from the base, and water constantly pours from the thousands of them across Rome. If you put your finger against the opening at the end of the spout to stop the water, it emerges from a hole in the bend of the spout, spewing water like a regular drinking fountain in the U.S. You can have a fresh drink, even without a cup.
People here detect differences in the taste of water from various aqueducts, and the amount of advertising for bottled water rivals the Coke/Pepsi wars in the U.S. Many people forgo bottled water altogether. Knowing which fountains are fed by which aqueducts, they take their bottles to the fountains and fill them directly. You can buy plastic carriers to hold six liter bottles (similar to the old Coke bottle six-packs). I often see people going to and fro with these contraptions. In the markets, vendors wash their veggies under the nasone, and I’ve even seen waiters from small restaurants take salad greens outside to wash them under this free, and freeflowing, water.
It’s amazing to think that this water, which is really quite delicious, is flowing through a system that originated more than 2000 years ago!

NOTE: The Trevi Fountain is the scene for my story “Feeding Frenzy” appearing in Fish Tales, Wildside Press, March 2011.

How an Idea Became a Story

            Fish Tales, an anthology of mystery stories from the Guppy chapter of Sisters in Crime, officially went on sale this week, following a week of ebook sales. I’m delighted to be one of the twenty-two authors.

The publication process spread over two years, including the writing, the evaluation, the editing, and the submissions to publishers. Wildside Press offered a contract last November, and now we have a book.

 As soon as the call for submissions went out, I knew immediately that I wanted to write a story spotlighting Caroline Woodlock, the protagonist in the novels I’m working on, and I had a plan. Then the call was amended. Each story had to include water, preferably water where fish would swim.

I was furious! To begin with, I thought the idea of a themed anthology was lame. Second, I thought the idea of using fish as the theme because our chapter of SinC is called the Guppies was even lamer. (For the uninitiated, let me explain that Guppy is short for Great Unpublished, a description that doesn’t fit many Guppies anymore.)

But I was wrong! I’ve read all the stories in the anthology, and they are a wonderful mix. Each author brings an original slant to the water/fish idea, and the central theme links the diverse stories. The back cover blurb tells the tale:

Fish Tales, The Guppy Anthology, casts a wide net across the mystery genre, delivering thrills, chills, and gills. This water-themed collection features locked room puzzles, police procedurals, cozy characters and hardboiled detectives. With a pool of motivations ranging from greed and revenge to loyalty and justice, these stories will lure you with killer hooks and fishy characters.

Come on in, the water’s fine. But be careful or you might find yourself sleeping with the fishes!

My original story featured neither fish nor water. I had to develop a new plan. Caroline lives in Rome, and while a river runs through the city, the Tiber doesn’t immediately bring fish to mind. She writes about food, so I realized that she could be cooking fish. A body of water was more problematic. A pot of water boiling for the pasta just wouldn’t do.

And then I had one of those “lightbulb” moments. The Trevi Fountain gushes water in the heart of Rome, and its imagery of fish and the sea provided a way to symbolize the murderer’s character. Once I had these two elements, the story practically wrote itself.

Throughout the story, Caroline cooks a fish stew from Livorno called cacciucco. The recipe follows. Originally a peasant dish, cacciucco has made its way into fine restaurants around the world. The recipe can be daunting, but if you take things in stages, it isn’t overwhelming.

Preliminaries

First, you need to make fish stock. You can make this ahead and store it in the freezer. Ask your fishmonger for fish scraps (the heads and bones left over from filleting fish); they’ll give them to you. Take these scraps home and put them in a pot with a white onion, a carrot, a rib of celery, some parsley stems and a little white wine. Cover with water, and bring to a simmer. Cook for about 30 minutes. Cool and strain. Boil it down to concentrate flavors if it seems too watery. You can freeze it at this point, and I recommend it. It’s like having gold in the freezer.

You can speed up the actual cooking process by doing preps of all the ingredients a few hours ahead and storing them in the fridge.

The Recipe

2-3 pounds mixed fish—really get a mixture varied flavors. If you can get a squid or an eel, so much the better. And a few small octopuses are also nice. And choose inexpensive fish; this was a peasant dish. (My story tells the legend of the soup’s origin.)

½ pound of mussels, cleaned of their beards

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

4 cloves of garlic

½ cup finely chopped Italian flat-leaf parsley

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 medium onion, (I prefer red)

1 medium carrot

1 cup dry white wine

2 cups canned tomato sauce

2 cups of fish stock

6 large shrimp

6 slices of rustic bread (Tuscan bread is unsalted)

Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the fish into bite-sized pieces and reserve.

Chop together the onion, carrot and two of the cloves of garlic.

Put the olive oil in a large pot, add the onion-carrot-garlic mixture, ¼ cup of parsley and the cayenne pepper. Cook over medium heat for about four minutes, until the vegetables begin to lose their color.

Pour in the wine and cook for a minute or two, then add the tomato sauce and the fish stock. Salt and pepper to taste. Add the fish, reserving the mussels and shrimp for later. Cook for about 20 minutes. Add the mussels and shrimp, and cook another 5-7 minutes until the shrimp has cooked through and the mussels have opened. Taste again for seasoning.

Chop the remaining garlic together with the remaining parsley. Place a slice of bread in each soup plate, ladle in the cacciucco, and sprinkle with the garlic-parsley mixture. Serves six.