A funky fountain with the brilliant drinking hole in Pietracamela
Now as I’ve said before, I am extremely disappointed in North America for our lack of water fountains. Ever since I have been in Europe – well since I entered Turkey, every country has had public fountains with drinkable water. So you might buy one bottle of water since unfortuantely I don’t have a water bottle, but then I keep that bottle and continue to refill and reuse it for upwards of two weeks sometimes.
A really old, almost rock ages like fountain in Civitela del Tronto. Excess water feeds into a water collection system
Now these countries have been through wars, have been bombed, have ancient infrastructure that is in need of repair and have to build new infrastructure. But they have clean water coming out of public fountains. Yes, you still see bottled water, but you know that you can find water to drink almost anywhere you go.
A brilliant simple design. Looking down on the spout of the fountain you can see a little hole on the top ...the water runs continuously in these fountains ...
... you cover up the end of the spout and the back pressure provides and upward drinking stream to drink from ... genious!
Now I don’t know the whole story and an Italian man told me that Italy has to spend a lot of money keeping these fountains and the drinking water going. But I also saw it in Turkey, Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia. I mean it makes total sense to keep public drinking water available to reduce the bottled water problem and landfill and recycling issues. So why in Canada have all of our public fountains, for the most part, been decommissioned. Even on the ferries, there used to be a drinking fountain, and they have disconnected that. I mean we come from a country with the most fresh water in the world and we rely on bottled water.
Even in the ancient city of Kotor, fountains are alive and well
It just infuriates me that Canada’s government is either too cheap or too deep in the bottled water corporate taxes to ensure that clean drinking water fountains are kept going throughout all of our populated areas. It is actually criminal that they are not. If Europe can do it, a wealthy, young country like Canada without the history of man’s presence in such a way as to really pollute water sources, should be doing it without fail. They were working in the 1970s when I was a kid, so what happened? I’m embarrassed by our lack of action.
The fabulous fountains in Belgrade
Yeah….I’m the first person to comment. 🙂
What a neat idea for a post…just to.talk about fountains. Who else would have thought of this? Thanks for the great pictures of all these fountains some of which are beautiful while others are unique.
To answer your question about the disappearing (drinking) fountains in Ontario…maybe it is a question about hygiene. I mean, it is not very sanitary when so many people use the same drinking fountain, is it? How often did those fountains actually get cleaned? Personally, I think it is to do with money. You know, the person who decided to put water in a plastic bottle and charge for it is a genius!!
Well sanitary doesn’t seem to be an issue in Europe. And they have more people. It’s more about design. These European ones – your mouth doesn’t touch anything and with copper piping they are pretty self-cleaning. I mean no one cleans a river and before man came along you could drink river water.
You are so right – it makes me upset now that I think about it, how much we rely on bottled water. I never do buy it and keep my bottle filled with tap water at all timesx.
I try to just buy one every new country, and that was easy to do in Italy.