Its original location was on the corner of Palazzo Soderini, between Piazza Barberini and Via Sistina. In one of the rooms on the ground floor of the building, Bernini had in fact designed a “booty” for water, that is, a system to collect the return water from the Triton fountain, which he had designed a few months earlier on commission from Pope Urban VIII Barberini (1623-1644).

The artist’s imagination, however, gave a service structure the unusual shape of an open bivalve shell. The lower valve served as a basin, while the other valve, modeled to adhere to the corner of the building behind, was decorated at the base with three bees (heraldic symbol of the Pope’s family). An inscription recalled the pope’s intervention for the construction of the fountain and the fountain as a “public ornament of the city”.

The fountain was dismantled in 1865 for traffic reasons and deposited in the municipal warehouses. Rebuilt between 1915 and 1916, it was located at the corner of the square towards Via Vittorio Veneto, in an isolated position. Fragments of the central bee and the portion of the valve on which it rests are the only original parts of the work.
The fountain was restored in 2000. In 2004 the head of a bee, which was lost following an act of vandalism, was replaced with a copy.