SIXTY-SIXTH
DAY
CITY DAYS
November
18, 2005
It is
Friday evening in Rome and we are at the end of our first week in the new pad
(ha). It has been an instructive couple
of days in almost every Roman way. Today
was a wonderful walk and talk led by Katherine, a Visiting Scholar at the
academy who is probably the world’s greatest expert on the historic Rome’s
water system. Essentially, Rome today
gets its water delivered by four gravity fed aqueducts. In Imperial Roman times there were eleven
aqueducts that served the city, but by the middle ages they were all destroyed
or ruined except for one, the aqua virgine that ends at the Trevi fountain. It is a very complex story about how the city
developed around its water sources, but the portion that interested us today
was the building or rebuilding of an old Roman aqueduct by Pope Sixtus V in
1587. I would call this guy the first
real developer in Rome. Not only did he
own the water rights from the aqueduct he commissioned to rebuild, but he
bought all the land around the square were the aqueduct ended. Aqueduct Felice is named after the Pope
himself. Sounds a bit like “Chinatown”
with the Pope taking the part of the fellow who owned the Owens Valley and a
big piece of LA real estate. Anyway, old
Sixtus V must have been a pretty smart dude.
The water channel is about 20 miles long and was built in less than two
years. Felice ends at the Piazza Susanna
with a gigantic sculpture of Moses carrying his staff and flanked by Roman
soldiers in full battle gear as well as the Pope’s lions spouting water. Very
large and impressive but mocked at the time it was built. It is on one of the highest points in Rome
above the Barbarini Palace and about a block above the Quirinal and Quatre
Fontane, four fountains on 4 corners of intersecting streets. They are captivating, but the two dueling
architects who built churches next to each other are even more fascinating-one
church is by Boromini and the other by his archrival Bernini. Across from these two churches the great
summer palace of that lovely guy, Sixtus runs along the Quirinal for over 400
yards. It is a huge pile of marble with
interior gardens that are open to the public once a year. The President of Italy now inhabits it. He does not live there, but I don’t think he
has a bigger house somewhere else. We
end our march at the fountain at the lower end of the Quirinal. The water pressure from the Felice Aqueduct
at this point is strong enough to throw water 25 feet in the air about the
Piazza but has been restricted because of conservation issues. This walk took about 3 hours and we only
walked about 2 miles around Rome. Still
the standing hurts and we walk home gently.
What a week. On Tuesday we had no hot water in the
kitchen, no phone and the radiators did not work. Now we have a mobile phone
(our land line still is not working but should be up and running in the next
couple of weeks). We now have hot water
in the kitchen but the radiators still don’t work and it’s starting to turn
cold. When Kim figured out the washing
machine (no dryer) she put a load in and it really worked. The problem was that the electricity could
not handle the lights, the TV and the washer simultaneously and boom, no
electricity. Where was the
superintendent when we needed her? We
had overloaded the circuit, but by turning everything off but the washer we
were able to get it back on. I hope this
is funny because I have been in a sort of black mood because it all seems so
different and challenging. It turns out that my mobile would not work because
you must register yourself with the company who owns the system. I found their office Wednesday and voila they
got me going after only a small hour delay.
The people that sold me the gear neglected to mention that I was to go
to another place and sign up. Language problems again and oh well, Italy. At the same time I bought an adaptor and a
phone so that if, if we ever get a line into the apartment, I may be able to do
some sort of dial-up connection to the Internet. In the meantime, we are going to a spot about
10 minutes walk into the Campo where we are connecting our own computer to
their line for our connection. It feels
like we have made some progress.
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