Throwing a coin in a fountain
Throwing a coin in a fountain is a wish made with something you give up. At the Trevi Fountain in Rome, the custom says a coin tossed over your shoulder ensures you will come back one day.
What it may mean
The best-known coin toss in the world is a wish about returning. People stand with their backs to the Trevi Fountain in Rome and throw a coin over the shoulder, so that fate will lead them back. It is a sweet idea: the hope here is not for money or love but for a second visit, a promise to yourself made in front of strangers. Many never do go back, and the coin still does its work by marking the place as worth returning to. Most lives hold a few places like that: a grandmother's town, a lake from childhood, a city where something began. Some sit only a day's drive away, untouched for years. Wherever you toss one, a coin in a fountain can stand for the place you keep meaning to revisit.
Depending on how you saw it
Where the Trevi coins go
The coins are swept out regularly and given to Caritas, the Catholic charity: more than a million euros a year. Each tourist's wish ends up helping someone in need. Which of your small gestures ends up helping someone you will never see?
A penny in a mall fountain
Shopping malls, hotel lobbies and office atriums are full of fountains with pennies on the bottom, thrown by people with no plan to come back at all. What do you wish for when the wish costs only a penny?
A pin in an English well
English wishers once dropped a pin into a wishing well, sure that the wish would then come to pass. In Perthshire, a well said to cure children demanded an offering of a penny, a rag or a pin. Which place do you never leave without a small gesture of your own?
Why it happens in nature
Fountains and wells have drawn offerings for centuries, and coins sink and stay visible in clear water, which makes the gesture satisfying. At the Trevi Fountain, coins are swept out and collected for the charity Caritas, which receives more than a million euros a year from them.
What folk beliefs say
Italy (Rome)
If you visit the Trevi Fountain in Rome, you toss a coin over your shoulder into the fountain so that fate will bring you back again; the informant was told this before her visit and again at the fountain.
Source: Maggie Zito (collector), Trevi Fountain (USC Digital Folklore Archive) (2026), folklore.usc.edu. View the page
England
In England, if a person drops a pin into a wishing well and makes a wish, that wish will surely come to pass.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 3 (1903), vol. 3, p. 1444 (file v 3). View the page
Scotland (Perthshire)
In Perthshire, Grew's well was said to cure children, but it was unlucky not to leave some offering: a penny, a rag or a pin.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 992. View the page
To reflect on
Which place have you sworn to yourself you would go back to, and what keeps you from going?