Bernini's Earliest Showpieces

Bernini's Earliest Showpieces The Barcaccia, Bernini's first fountain, is a striking chef d'oeuvre built at the foot of the Trinita dei Monti in Piaza di Spagna.

To this day, you will see Roman residents and vacation goers filling this spot to revel in chit chatter and being among other people. Bernini would undoubtedly have been happy to know that people still flock to what has become one the city's most fashionable areas, that around his amazing fountain. Dating back to around 1630, Pope Urbano VIII commissioned what was to be the earliest fountain of the master's career. Illustrated in the fountain's design is a great vessel gradually sinking into the Mediterranean Sea. The great flooding of the Tevere that covered the whole region with water in the 16th was memorialized by this momentous fountain as recorded by documents dating back to this period. Absenting himself from Italy only once in his life for a prolonged time period, in 1665 Bernini traveled to France.

Aqueducts: The Remedy to Rome's Water Troubles

Aqueducts: The Remedy to Rome's Water Troubles Aqueducts: Remedy Rome's Water Troubles 16434154239.jpg

Aqua Anio Vetus, the first raised aqueduct assembled in Rome, began supplying the men and women living in the hills with water in 273 BC, though they had depended on natural springs up till then. If people residing at higher elevations did not have access to springs or the aqueduct, they’d have to depend on the remaining existing solutions of the day, cisterns that gathered rainwater from the sky and subterranean wells that received the water from below ground. From the early sixteenth century, water was routed to Pincian Hill through the underground channel of Acqua Vergine. Pozzi, or manholes, were engineered at standard stretches along the aqueduct’s channel. Whilst these manholes were created to make it much easier to sustain the aqueduct, it was also possible to use buckets to extract water from the channel, which was practiced by Cardinal Marcello Crescenzi from the time he purchased the property in 1543 to his passing in 1552. Even though the cardinal also had a cistern to accumulate rainwater, it couldn't provide sufficient water. To give himself with a more efficient system to obtain water, he had one of the manholes exposed, offering him access to the aqueduct below his property.