fontano

Two words from one Latin spring, and they do not overlap.Fonto at rank 1,187 is the natural thing: water coming out of the ground, and by extension the source of a river, a story or a quotation. Fontano is the built thing: stone, basins, a jet, somebody's civic budget. A fonto is found; a fontano is commissioned. English blurs this with fountain, which is why English speakers reach for the wrong one and write about drinking from an ornamental fontano in the mountains.

The seam is Latin, not Esperanto. There is no -an- suffix in fontano, so do not read it as a member of a font. That would give "a spring-dweller", which is not a word. The -an- is part of the Italian noun, and the whole thing is one root as far as Esperanto is concerned. Its own derivations behave normally: fontaneto for a small one, fontana akvo, and the specific trinkfontano for the drinking sort, which does what English calls a drinking fountain.

Where you will meet it. Town description, almost always. A fontano lives on a placo at 1,403 or in a parko at 1,042, usually with a statuo at 1,690 somewhere near it. It is one of the handful of words that make a travel paragraph sound like it was written by somebody who has been there.