Hi, well you can begin my modeling the actual fountain by lathing a profile curve along its Y axis, then you will have a simple model, you can add more detail though subdiv or even bump maps, for the water, create a particle system (I used) spray, place it into possition shooting up, and binded to a wind + gravity fields. to get a nice running water effect right click on the particle system go into properties, and under "motion blur" check "image" and type a multipler or 2.0 - 5.0 depending of the effect you want. make sure the particle system starts generating before the animation, (ie, -35 frames or so under the timing parameters of the P-sys. and voila ! I have a scene I created to for you to look over, I just don't know where to put it for dowload, maybe Jeff can arrange that. _hint Jeff_ otherwise I'll e-mail it to you.
Oh, and once you have created one fountain to your taste, just group all of the components and clone.
good luck bye