Fountains of Papal Rome/Introduction
Rome has been called the most religious city in the world because of the number of her churches. With equal propriety, and perhaps with greater justice, she might be called the cleanest city in the world because of the number of her fountains. Pagan emperors and Christian popes alike have found both profit and pleasure in adding another fountain or in making or repairing one more aqueduct to give a still greater supply of water to the Roman populace. No other people, with the possible exception of the Spanish Moors, have so appreciated the value and the beauty of abundant water.
There are few squares, even in the Rome of to-day, where, at least in the silence of the night, the sound of splashing water may not be heard. The tiny fountain, often fern-fringed, with its ceaseless, slender stream of water, is the one priceless possession in hundreds of old courtyards, where it fills a damp and lonely silence with charm, or redeems by its indestructible quality of beauty the meanness of the squalid life about it. It is impossible to think of Rome without her fountains. Yet, after a few weeks, the eye is hardly aware of their presence. It is as if by their very beauty and omnipresence they had acquired the divine attributes of sunlight; and it requires the silence, as with the sunlight it requires the cloud, to rouse our consciousness to their existence. They take their place among the elemental causes of happiness, since the pain we feel at their loss is the only adequate measure of the pleasure they give us.
It is difficult for the man of to-day to picture to himself the abundance and splendor of the fountains in imperial Rome. Some idea of their character may be obtained from the description gathered from various sources of Nero's fountain on the Cælian. The mingled waters of the Claudian and the Anio Novus aqueducts were brought thither over the Neronian arches. A wall fifty feet in height, faced with rare marbles and decorated by hemicycles and statues, formed the background of the first cascade. At the foot of this wall a huge basin received the stream, which then fell into another basin ten feet below the first, and thence flowed into the great artificial lake, described by Suetonius as like unto a sea, which filled all that space now occupied by the Coliseum. Of great magnificence also was the fountain of Severus Alexander on the Esquiline which served to introduce the Acqua Alexandrina, the eleventh and last water-supply of imperial Rome. A coin of the period gives a representation of this fountain, and in it can be traced a certain resemblance to the Fontana Paola which stands at the present day on the Janiculum, and which in its size and quantity of water reproduces faintly the fountains of the past.
That fine phrase, "la nostalgie de la civilisation," nowhere finds a more perfect illustration than in the attitude of the Western world toward Rome. Some homing instinct of the human heart has for centuries carried thither men of every nation and of every sort of belief or unbelief; and the conviction that it will bring them thither in the future as in the past is implied in that other name by which we know her. She is the Eternal City. Every one can feel but no one can explain the charm which she has over the spirits of men. Here the psychic forces of the world's great past are stored in imperishable memories. Here each individual finds spiritual influences which seem to have been waiting through the ages for his own peculiar appropriation. King Theodoric, in the sixth century, spoke not only for himself but for all succeeding generations of Northmen when he said that Rome was indifferent to none because foreign to none. It seems as if the feeling for Rome were an instinct congenital with our appetites and our passions. It requires no justification and it admits of no substitute. It is dateless and universal. The Gothic king of the past finds a spiritual brother in the schoolboy of to-day who caught his mother's arm on the Terrace at Frascati to say, with an uncontrollable tremor in his voice: "See there; that little spot over there! That is Rome, and she was once the whole world!" King and schoolboy might have met familiarly in some sunny portico of the classic city. Both were members of the great freemasonry of the lovers of Rome, which stretches its network far and wide over our civilization.
In this company there are not a few who find themselves in Rome, yet not able to see Rome — to see it, that is, as the historians, artists, archaeologists, and their own minds call upon them to see it. Their right to tread the Roman streets depends upon their obedience to some law compelling an existence lived entirely in the open air and in the broad sunshine. To such the gates of Paradise seem closed. To be forbidden the galleries and churches and catacombs and the hidden recesses of the old ruins appears an intolerable fate. Yet even to these, who have made the great acceptance and are living upon the half-loaf of life — even to these, Rome is kind. Little by little, in easy periods, they can get back into the days of the Renaissance, of the Counter-Reformation, of the Napoleonic Era, and of the great Risorgimento. This can be done under the conditions of open air and sunshine; for it is in such surroundings that we find the fountains, and the fountains of Rome are in themselves title-pages to Roman history.