A major cleaning operation began at Rome's Trevi Fountain on Monday as the man accused by authorities of throwing a red industrial dye into its waters continued to proclaim his innocence.
City cleaners squirted the fountain's marble features with jets of warm water and sponged the rim of the basin in order to remove every trace of the red colouring that gave the famous monument a new crimson look on Friday.
The basin of the eighteenth-century baroque fountain, visited by millions of tourists every year, was emptied to facilitate the cleaning work, which was expected to continue on Tuesday.
The waters of Rome's most famous fountain turned blood red on Friday after a man threw paint into the basin in a bizarre act of vandalism apparently inspired by the Futurists of the early 20th century.
Thanks to photos taken by security cameras, the man was later identified as Graziano Cecchini, 54, a right-wing extremist. He is expected to face charges of damaging public monuments.
Two or three other people were believed to have been with him when he struck on Friday afternoon, as the usual crowd of tourists milled around the fountain. The others have yet to be identified.
Cecchini held a press conference on Monday outside the central Roman police station where he was scheduled to make a statement.
"It wasn't me. But whoever did it was a genius, a Futurist. He demonstrated that you can protest without violence and without damaging anything," he said.
Police had feared that the paint in the water of the fountain could leave permanent stains on the white marble. But it later became clear that, with Monday's thorough clean up, this would not be the case.
Leaflets found beside the fountain after the paint incident claimed that the colouring of the monument had been carried out by 'FTM Futurist Action 2007', a name which had never been heard of before.
The leaflet said this group aimed to battle against "everything and everyone with a spirit of healthy violence" and to turn this "grey bourgeois society into a triumph of colour".
Cecchini's lawyer said the photos in the hands of police failed to prove definitively that he was the perpetrator of the vandalism.
The baroque fountain is a tourist magnet and one of the symbols of Rome. Actress Anita Ekberg frolicked in its waters in Federico Fellini's 1960 film classic La Dolce Vita.
On Monday consumer group Codacons suggested colouring the fountain's waters a different colour every week, so as to make it more interesting for tourists.
The association complained that too much fuss had been made about the incident and asked how much money had been spent on the large police operation which had followed it. The funds would have been better spent fighting petty crime, Codacons said.
