The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City (review)

Since antiquity, the people of the city of Rome have had a complex relationship with their environment. No aspect of that relationship was more important than the provision of water for the city. From the time of the Roman Empire, leading Romans expanded their power in their capital city through beautification projects involving both infrastructure and water features of great technological sophistication. Katherine Wentworth Rinne's book explains with clarity and cleverness how water impacted Rome in the later periods of the Renaissance and into the baroque. She reveals how water flowed across the full spectrum of Roman life, reaching both pontiffs and laundresses, in the crucial years between 1560 and 1630 when Rome transformed from a medieval to a baroque city. Rinne successfully accomplishes her goal by solidly supporting her arguments with contemporary texts and high-quality photos, plans, and maps.

The book is divided into nine chapters with an introduction, epilogue, comprehensive notes, and bibliography. These touch on broad themes, from the re-use of ancient aqueducts to fountain design, the spread of water systems from the center of the city to surrounding hilltop estates and gardens, the role of the Tiber River in the city's life before the extensive development of the fountain system, the hierarchy of Rome's water use, and the history of its streets and drains.

With the exception of the sixteenth-century fountain architect Giacomo della Porta and his assistant Bartolomeo Gritti, Rinne is not as interested in fountain authorship as she is in its patronage. While traditional scholars may be skeptical of this choice, the book nevertheless leads to fresh thinking about technology and society and about how Rome's fountain art related to urban development and urban infrastructure. Chapter 1, "The Tiber's Flow," considers the use of the river by Rome's churches, monasteries, hospitals, gardens, bathhouses, and manufacturing enterprises before any of the ancient aqueducts were restored or replaced (Acqua Vergine 1560-70; Acqua Felice 1585; Acqua Paola 1607-12). Rinne documents in chapter 2, "The Acqua Vergine and Renovatio Romae," that Pius V's renovatio Romae (restoration of Rome) was a response to the profound sense of physical devastation that hovered over the city as a result of the sack of Rome in 1527 and the horrific Tiber flood of 1530. Rinne argues that the abandonment of the Tiber (polluted by tanners, shops, mills, and illicit dumps) for water brought by the refurbished Acqua Vergine both helped the papacy restore the faithful to the church after the Council of Trent (p. 5), and led to improved hydraulic technology and public health.

In chapter 3, "Surveying the City, Distributing the Water," we learn about water distribution and the need for new water resources when fountains were added to the system in order to equalize pressure throughout. Guglielmo della Porta (1570s) developed a new distribution strategy and saw that water itself was a material that could shape fountain design. Because of his brilliant understanding both of gravity and of the topography of the Campo Marzio, he emerged as a master fountain designer, unequaled for nearly fifty years, until Gian Lorenzo Bernini transformed Rome with his most famous fountains (the Triton, Four Rivers, and Barcaccia, or "Little Boat" of the Piazza di Spagna), and ultimately Nicola Salvi produced the Trevi Fountain by 1762. By 1630 there were eighty documented public fountains in Rome and hundreds of private ones, each connected to one of these aqueducts by hidden underground conduits. Chapter 4, "The Fountains of Giacomo della Porta," focuses on six great fountains: Piazza del Popolo, Piazza della Rotonda, Piazza Colonna, Piazza Navona, Piazza Giudea, and Piazza Mattei. The chapter explains why it took some 120 years (1453-1570) to restore the Acqua Vergine and another twenty-one (1570-91) for della Porta to build the first magnificent fountains in this new Rome.

Chapter 5, "Undercurrents and Water Lust," chapter...