Aqua Virgo
The Aqua Virgo is a Roman aqueduct — one of the great engineering achievements of the [[augustus|Augustan]] age — built by [[agrippa|Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa]] in 19 BCE to supply water to his elaborate public baths and gardens in the [[campus-martius|Campus Martius]]. It is the only ancient Roman aqueduct still functioning today, the sole survivor of the eleven that once served the city, carrying water along the same limestone-filtered route it has followed for over two thousand years. The water that still flows through the [[trevi-fountain|Trevi Fountain]] comes from the Aqua Virgo, making it the longest-serving piece of civil infrastructure in the Western world.
Construction
[[agrippa|Agrippa]] built the almost entirely subterranean aqueduct as part of his massive public works program under [[augustus|Augustus]], a campaign that transformed [[rome|Rome]]'s infrastructure and gave the city its first reliable public water supply. The aqueduct runs roughly 21 kilometers from springs at [[salone|Salone]], east of [[rome|Rome]], to the [[campus-martius|Campus Martius]], mostly underground, making it — unlike the dramatically arcaded [[aqua-claudia|Aqua Claudia]] or the towering [[anio-novus|Anio Novus]] — far less vulnerable to siege warfare and structural damage than the raised aqueducts that crossed the Roman countryside on stone arches.
The Name
The name means "Virgin Water." According to an old legend, as recorded by [[frontinus|Frontinus]] — the Roman water commissioner who wrote the definitive treatise on [[rome|Rome]]'s aqueducts around 97 CE — a young girl showed [[agrippa|Agrippa]]'s soldiers the previously unknown location of the spring, and the aqueduct was named in her honor — a story [[frontinus|Frontinus]] illustrated by noting that a painting at the source depicted the scene. The water was prized by the [[rome|Romans]] for its exceptional purity and its remarkable coldness, qualities that made the Aqua Virgo — the finest water, the Romans believed, of any aqueduct in the city — particularly desirable for the baths it was built to supply.
Survival
The Aqua Virgo has survived because it never stopped being useful. When [[rome|Rome]]'s other great aqueducts were cut by invading armies or fell into catastrophic disrepair during the decline of [[the-roman-empire|the empire]] and the medieval period, the Aqua Virgo — its underground course protecting it from the destruction that ruined the raised aqueducts — kept flowing. Popes — beginning in the medieval period and continuing through the [[renaissance|Renaissance]] — restored and expanded it repeatedly, and the current [[trevi-fountain|Trevi Fountain]] itself — commissioned by [[pope-clement-xii|Pope Clement XII]] in 1730, replacing a terminal fountain [[pope-nicholas-v|Pope Nicholas V]] rebuilt in 1453 — still draws on the same Augustan-era water supply. The aqueduct was renamed the Acqua Vergine during the [[renaissance|Renaissance]] and — still supplying fountains across central [[rome|Rome]] — remains a working piece of two-thousand-year-old infrastructure in an age when most Roman engineering is studied only as ruin.