The Source of Modern Outdoor Fountains

The Source of Modern Outdoor Fountains The translation of hundreds of ancient Greek documents into Latin was commissioned by the scholarly Pope Nicholas V who led the Church in Rome from 1397 until 1455. It was imperative for him to embellish the city of Rome to make it worthy of being called the capital of the Christian world. At the behest of the Pope, the Aqua Vergine, a ruined aqueduct which had carried clean drinking water into Rome from eight miles away, was restored starting in 1453. A mostra, a monumental commemorative fountain constructed by ancient Romans to mark the point of entry of an aqueduct, was a custom which was restored by Nicholas V. The architect Leon Battista Alberti was directed by the Pope to put up a wall fountain where we now find the Trevi Fountain. Adjustments and extensions, included in the repaired aqueduct, eventually supplied the Trevi Fountain and the well-known baroque fountains in the Piazza del Popolo and Piazza Navona with the necessary water supply.

Acqua Vergine: The Solution to Rome's Water Problems

Acqua Vergine: The Solution to Rome's Water Problems Rome’s very first elevated aqueduct, Aqua Anio Vetus, was built in 273 BC; prior to that, citizens living at higher elevations had to rely on local streams for their water. If citizens living at higher elevations did not have accessibility to springs or the aqueduct, they’d have to count on the other existing techniques of the time, cisterns that collected rainwater from the sky and subterranean wells that received the water from below ground. In the very early sixteenth century, the city began to make use of the water that flowed underground through Acqua Vergine to furnish water to Pincian Hill. Pozzi, or manholes, were built at regular stretches along the aqueduct’s channel. Whilst these manholes were created to make it less difficult to sustain the aqueduct, it was also possible to use buckets to extract water from the channel, which was done by Cardinal Marcello Crescenzi from the time he acquired the property in 1543 to his passing in 1552. He didn’t get sufficient water from the cistern that he had built on his residential property to collect rainwater. That is when he decided to create an access point to the aqueduct that ran under his residential property.