WHERE ROME, BARCELONA, AND AI CONVERGE

A New Delhi courtyard transforms into a surrealist sanctuary inspired by Rome's Trevi Fountain. Designed by Manish Gulati, Founder of MOFA Studio, Fonte D'Amore is a sculptural meditation on memory, water, and time shaped through AI and craft

- Kashish Kaushal

You may or may never have been to Rome’s Trevi Fountain, but that hardly matters. Unless you live under a rock, chances are you've still seen it. Instagram and the cinema have made it universal— that moment when you toss a coin and wish for a pipe dream. My own last recollection of the Trevi Fountain was the visual of Emily Cooper, Netflix’s American in Paris (and now, Rome), moving through the Eternal City with the devastatingly handsome, Roman heir to his family’s cashmere company Marcello Muratori.

The fantasy of Rome—think la dolce vita, spontaneous love, and architectural grandeur, has been democratised many times through screens and stories. And Trevi, this baroque masterpiece, has a way of lodging itself in memory, not as a photograph but as a feeling—of water rhythmically cascading over stone, and the yearning of wishes coming true! For one New Delhi couple, this exact feeling became the seed of something extraordinary.

Five years after their own coin toss at Trevi, they approached Manish Gulati’s MOFA Studio with a request that might have seemed impossible: transform their unused 60-square-meter courtyard into a space that carried forward the memory of Rome, the sound of water, the sculptural grace of the Renaissance, and the playful spirit of Gaudí's Barcelona they'd fallen for during their travels. What Manish delivered transcends replication. Fonte D’Amore is not Rome transplanted to India. It is memory made spatial—a profound meditation on how we carry experiences forward through form.