Trouble With The Trevi

Infrastructure issues rear their ugly heads:

For 2,000 years the Trevi Fountain in Rome has provided a constant influx of fresh water for one of the most fabled sites in the city. Now, with summer around the corner, the supply has dried up....

Water engineers blame the reduction to a trickle of the normally gushing Aqua Virgo on damage to underground conduits caused by work on a suburban garage.

...So as not to disappoint tourists — who throw coins into the Trevi Fountain to make a wish to return to the Eternal City — Acea, the Rome water authority, has been recycling the fountain water for two weeks. Visitors have until now been unaware of the problem. But there is a crisis looming.

“The problem is that we cannot do this for long,” Acea said. “The Trevi Fountain has to be drained and cleaned every two weeks.”

...The severing of the Aqua Virgo has highlighted the remarkable extent to which Rome depends on engineering from two millenniums ago. Its absence has also dried up fountains in the Villa Borghese Gardens, the main park in Rome, as well as on Piazza Colonna in front of Palazzo Chigi, the Prime Minister’s residence, and at the Pantheon.

Unlike many other Roman water supplies, which were carried above ground, the Aqua Virgo ran largely in conduits beneath the surface and thus survived the neglect of the Middle Ages, when many Roman overground aqueducts collapsed.

In the 15th century the Aqua Virgo was extended by the papal authorities across Rome to what is now the Trevi Fountain. The present fountain, designed by Niccolò Salvi in 1732, was completed in 1762.

Officials said that work on the underground garage at a villa in the suburb of Parioli had ruptured the pipes carrying the water. Workers, apparently not realising the consequences, had blocked the conduits with cement and rubble.