Vitali Fountain

The Vitali Fountain, also known as the Petrovsky Fountain, stands on Theatre Square opposite the Bolshoi Theatre and is considered one of the oldest surviving fountains in Moscow. It takes its name from its creator, the Italian-born sculptor Giovanni (Ivan) Vitali, who transformed a purely utilitarian water-distribution structure into a work of decorative art.

In 1827 a simple water-distribution basin with a pipe in the middle was installed on what was then Petrovskaya Square, supplied with drinking water for Muscovites through the underground network of the Mytishchi water system. Two years later a large-scale reconstruction of the square began, and in 1835, at the request of Osip Bove, chief architect of Moscow's façade projects, Vitali took on the sculptural decoration of the basin. In this way an ornate fountain appeared in place of a plain water-distribution column, while still retaining its practical function.

The basin is supported by a pedestal bearing four small cupid figures, each symbolizing one of the arts: tragedy, comedy, poetry, and music. The cast-iron figures were made by craftsmen at the Batashev factories in the settlement of Vyksa on the Oka, in what is now the urban district of Vyksa. The lower part of the structure has special niches for watering horses, and the sculptor's name and the year the work was completed, 1835, can still be read on the monument today.

The fountain supplied the city with about seventeen thousand buckets of water daily, and additional branch pipes were laid from it — to the debtors' prison and to the merchant Chelyshev's bathhouse, on the site of which the Metropol Hotel (also designed by Bove) later rose. In Soviet times the fountain stopped serving its direct function, but it continued to draw people — war veterans traditionally gathered here. Vitali created a similar fountain on Lubyanskaya Square in the same years, but that monument later met a far less fortunate fate.

In 1995 the structure was reconstructed and restarted, equipped with winter LED illumination — the first solution of its kind for Moscow. Today the fountain's condition is overseen by the Gormost trust: the water in the basin is changed weekly, and the sculptures are cleaned by hand. Among residents there is a legend about an underground tunnel connecting the capital's military facilities beneath the fountain — in reality there is only a small pumping station there, and the rumors were fueled by a nearby metro ventilation shaft.

Today the Vitali Fountain remains a notable architectural feature of Theatre Square — a rare monument to nineteenth-century urban water supply, organically woven into the appearance of the historic center beside the Bolshoi Theatre.