"It’s remarkably dark inside Lombardino’s Restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, but give your eyes a few minutes to adjust and they’ll soon settle on the restaurant’s most prized possession: a full-on replica of Rome’s Trevi Fountain—water feature, loose change, Oceanus’ scarf-censored loins and all. Brought over from Italy when Matteo Lombardino (himself an import from Sicily) opened his restaurant in the 1950s, the three-foot-wide ceramic fountain is a masterpiece at 1/25th scale—a ratio that also reflects the number of days it’s actually functioned. 'I’m pretty sure it has broken every two weeks since Lombardino first installed it,' says Michael Banas, who currently co-owns the restaurant with chef Patrick O’Halloran. 'We have regulars who’ve been coming since the ’50s and they tell us that it’s been leaking since day one.' That hasn’t stopped generations of Madisonians from tossing in their coins, unconcerned about the fate of wishes thrown into a wonky fountain. It says a lot about our salt-of-the-earth, glass-half-full optimism—even when the glass is a fountain, and the fountain is completely empty. The restaurant’s mustachioed greeter invites guests to come as they are. It also says a lot about us that, even as the kitchen’s competency has wavered about as consistently as the mini Fontana di Trevi’s, the restaurant has always been the city’s favorite spot to celebrate. It’s where my grandparents had their dates, free from the kids for one night, and the site of many birthdays, graduation dinners, and fetes on down our family tree. It doesn’t really matter that the food’s having a real moment under the current chef, or if the classic red sauce menu—chicken diavola, tiramisù—has evolved to include nduja salami, berbere spices, and local pea shoots and mushrooms. At its core, nothing really changes. 'It’s somehow dated and timeless at the same time,' Banas says of the restaurant. 'It’s dark and full of things from all the previous owners. The fountain leaks and drives me insane. I don’t know why Lombardino put it there, but I can never get rid of it. It’s all a part of the DNA.'" - ByMadeleine Davies
