AQUA ROMA

Water as engineering, politics and symbol in the Urbs

This itinerary traces two thousand years of the history of water in six stops — on foot, through the most beautiful parts of the city. It begins at the Parco degli Acquedotti, on the south-eastern outskirts: an open, almost lunar landscape where the arches of the Aqua Claudia rise to 28 metres above the Roman countryside, and within minutes one understands why the Romans boasted of having built something more extraordinary than the Pyramids. It enters the Baths of Diocletian — capable of accommodating ten thousand bathers a day — to discover that washing, in ancient Rome, was a social, almost political act. It stands before the Moses of Sixtus V in Piazza San Bernardo, the first monumental fountain of modern Rome, built in 1587 when the papacy restored to the city the water the barbarians had taken from it a thousand years before. From there it descends to the Trevi Fountain — where one can drink, from the small side fountain, the same water as Agrippa's aqueduct. It crosses Piazza Navona, where Bernini transformed the four great rivers of the world into a cosmography of marble and sound. It climbs finally to the Janiculum, where the Fontanone dell'Acqua Paola dominates Rome from its six columns of Egyptian granite and the name of Paul V engraved in bronze — so that no one would forget who had brought all that water up there.