Rome’s Early Water Delivery Systems

Rome’s Early Water Delivery Systems With the manufacturing of the 1st raised aqueduct in Rome, the Aqua Anio Vetus in 273 BC, individuals who lived on the city’s hillsides no longer had to depend only on naturally-occurring spring water for their requirements.

Over this time period, there were only two other techniques capable of providing water to high areas, subterranean wells and cisterns, which amassed rainwater. From the early sixteenth century, water was routed to Pincian Hill by way of the subterranean channel of Acqua Vergine. During the length of the aqueduct’s route were pozzi, or manholes, that gave entry. The manholes made it easier to maintain the channel, but it was also achievable to use buckets to extract water from the aqueduct, as we observed with Cardinal Marcello Crescenzi when he possessed the property from 1543 to 1552, the year he died. The cistern he had built to gather rainwater wasn’t adequate to meet his water needs. To provide himself with a more streamlined way to gather water, he had one of the manholes opened, offering him access to the aqueduct below his residence.

The History of Garden Water Fountains

The History of Garden Water Fountains Pope Nicholas V, himself a well educated man, governed the Roman Catholic Church from 1397 to 1455 during which time he commissioned many translations of ancient classical Greek documents into Latin. It was important for him to beautify the city of Rome to make it worthy of being known as the capital of the Christian world. Beginning in 1453, the ruined ancient Roman aqueduct known as the Aqua Vergine which had brought clean drinking water into the city from eight miles away, underwent repair at the behest of the Pope. Building a mostra, a grandiose celebratory fountain built by ancient Romans to memorialize the entry point of an aqueduct, was a custom revived by Nicholas V. At the bidding of the Pope, architect Leon Battista Alberti undertook the construction of a wall fountain in the place where we now find the Trevi Fountain. The aqueduct he had refurbished included modifications and extensions which eventually allowed it to supply water to the Trevi Fountain as well as the famed baroque fountains in the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza Navona.