1822
1981
July 1819 The fountain on the Quirinal, or rather the group formed by the statues the obelisk, & the fountain is however the most admirable of all. From the Piazza Quirinale...you see the boundless ocean of domes spires & columns which is the city of Rome. On a pedestal of white marble rises an obelisk of red granite piercing the blue sky. Before it is a vast basin of porphyry, in the midst of which rises a column of the purest water which collects into itself all the overhanging colours of the sky, and breaks them into a thousand prismatic hues and graduated shadows—they fall together with its dashing water-drops into the outer basin.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters, II, 88–89