Making a living from change tossed into a fountain is an unusual job — but a perfectly legal way to put bread on the table. Italian courts ruled that Roberto Cercelletta, who has been scooping out coins tossed into Rome’s Trevi fountain for about 20 years, is not stealing public money. Charities who wish to collect the money, however, have announced a public battle against him.

Cercelletta, nicknamed “D’Artagnan” after the famous musketeer, gets his hands into the gelid water’s in one of Rome’s most famous landmarks between 5 and 6 a.m. six days a week.The enterprising citizen and two assistants don florescent vests of the local electrical/water company, though they fool no one. Cercelletta, responsible for breaking the nose of an ‘interfering’ officer, has been fined by police hundreds of times, but has yet to pay any tickets. On Wednesday, he jumped into the fountain and slashed his belly to protest the new measures against him.

Officially unemployed, the daily harvest of cents, yen and euro earns him the salary of a prince: an estimated 180,000 USD a year. Not bad for about 15 minutes of work per day. City officials announced they will start collecting the money — on behalf of charity Caritas — and plan to install a motion detector and alarm in the fountain to discourage treasure hunters.

Tourists from around the world stand with their backs to the 1762 fountain and toss coins over the left shoulder– based on the superstition that if they do they will return to the Eternal City one day. Charity organization Caritas, which retrieves the money on Sundays when Cercelletta takes a day off, tried to get a court order to stop him. The court ruled that the money belonged to no one and Cercelletta plans to continute raking it in — candidating himself for the official job with the city if needs be. The fountain has long been a part of city iconography — thanks in part to films like "Three Coins in a Fountain" and the famous romp by Anita Ekberg in "La Dolce Vita."

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La Dolce Vita

So much for fat is beautiful: Italy’s recently-elected Miss Chubby, weighing in at 427 lbs, confessed she would like to lose a few pounds.

Thirty-six year old Maria Dore, a housewife whose cites pizza with mushrooms as a favorite food, won the crown of the 14th-annual contest but admitted shortly afterwards that her girth ‘weighs on her.’
Dore beat out 40 bountiful beauties in the Miss Cicciona Contest, all of whom weighed at least 220 pounds. Contest founder Gianfranco Lazzereschi, after many years in the fashion industry, got the idea for a lighthearted contest for ‘people of a certain weight’ and says the biggest obstacle was convincing the public it wasn’t meant to insult the oversized.

Most Italians, however, would rather undergo surgery than be obese – spending some $22 million USD yearly for surgery to shave off extra pounds. At around 15% of men and 21% of women, Italians are half as obese as U.S. residents.

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