Welcome back to Two to Tü! Despite my best-laid plans, I never did get anything posted last week while Chris and I were in the U.S.  Ah well. I wound up spending a couple of days going down to DC from Baltimore and doing some research in the Library of Congress (LOC) photographic archives, which led to the discovery of the subject of  today’s Monday Mystery. Of course, it wasn’t actually anything in the photography archives that is the mystery. Rather, it was a surprising fountain, since it seemed, when first viewed from a distance, that the fountain looks remarkably like a model of the Trevi Fountain in Rome.

But what would a model of the Trevi Fountain be doing in front of the main LOC building in Washington, DC, I wondered?  The heat and humidity as I made the trek from Union Station to the LOC building reminded me of the weather in Italy the week before last,  so when I spied this fountain from a distance, I thought perhaps my eyes were playing tricks on me and I just had Italy on my mind because of the heat. And as i got closer I realized that it was really much, much smaller and less ornate than the Roman Trevi fountain.

However, according to the LOC website, this American fountain was indeed built-in the general style of the Trevi fountain in Rome.

That photo was taken in the early 20th century (it’s from the LOC archives), but the fountain has ben there since the building went up in the late 1800s.

It isn’t  a duplicate of the Italian fountain, though, just reminiscent of it.  It’s been there since the building was built-in the 1880s, according to the LOC’s website. I haven’t tried tracking down any information on why the architect decided on this design. Maybe he needed a fountain design that would be wide enough to span across the entire front of the building at the bottom of the steps, since that’s exactly what it does.

Here’s a view of the western side of it, taken in 1897:

Here’s my photo from 2014 is taken from a similar angle; note the accidental similarity of the angles in the two shots. I didn’t look at the photos in the LOC of this fountain before I took my photos:

If you look on the web, most people have lots of closeup of the nymph statues on either side of Neptune there in the center. But what caught my eye and cried out for its closeup, however, was a tortoise:

Now, I have played with the contrast and brightness a bit in that photo to bring out the patterns in the water. I didn’t intend it to make the tortoise more realistic looking, but I think maybe it did, eh? See what you think. 😉