The Water in Rome's Street Fountains Comes From an Aqueduct Built in 19 BC

The first thing most visitors notice about Rome in July is the heat. The second, if they're paying attention, is that water is pouring continuously out of small cast-iron posts on street corners, into a drain, apparently wasted, all day and all night. Nobody turns it off. Nobody seems bothered.

Those are nasoni — big noses, for the curved spout — and they are drinking fountains. There are around 2,500 of them across the city. The water is cold, it's tested, it's free, and Romans fill bottles from them without a second thought. Tourists walk past them clutching a €3 plastic bottle bought from a stand ten metres away.

The two-thousand-year-old part

Most of Rome's water now arrives through a modern aqueduct from springs outside the city. But not all of it. The Acqua Vergine still runs, and it is the direct descendant of the Aqua Virgo, completed by Agrippa in 19 BC — the same Agrippa who built the original Pantheon. It has been carrying water into the centre of Rome, more or less continuously, for over two thousand years.

Once you know that, the fountains of Rome stop being scenery and start being infrastructure. The city's great baroque waterworks are all termini and outlets of specific aqueducts, and the reason they gush rather than trickle is that they were never pumped. Water arrives under gravity, from higher ground, and it does not have an off switch.

Why the water runs constantly

This is the question everyone asks, and the answer is not carelessness. The nasoni were introduced in 1874, when the new capital needed free drinking water in every neighbourhood, and the continuous flow does three jobs at once: it keeps the water moving so it stays fresh and cold, it relieves pressure in the network, and it means there's no tap to break or be left running. The water that isn't drunk goes back into the system.

How to actually drink from one

There's a trick, and it's the small piece of local competence that makes you look like you've been here before. Most nasoni have a small hole on the top of the spout. Block the main opening at the bottom with your finger, and the water jets upward out of that hole in a neat arc — a drinking fountain, at face height, no bending and no cupped hands.

• Carry an empty bottle from the first morning. You'll refill it three or four times a day in summer and never buy water again.
• The water is the same supply that reaches the taps in your hotel. It is not spring water of dubious origin.
• If a tap or fountain is marked acqua non potabile, that means not drinkable — rare, but it exists, and it's always signed.
• The city publishes a map of the fountains; there's almost always one within a few hundred metres in the centre.

The habit worth stealing

This is a small thing that quietly changes a summer trip. Rome in August punishes people who ration water — the heat is dry and relentless and comes off the stone late into the evening. Being able to drink whenever you pass a corner, without hunting for a shop, is the difference between a long walk being pleasant and being endured.

It also nudges you into the right rhythm. Romans move through the day in relation to shade and water. They walk the shaded side of the street, they stop, they drink, they sit down at four in the afternoon when the sun is at its worst and go back out at seven when the city becomes livable again. The fountains are part of a way of using the city that's two thousand years old, and you can join it on your first morning for the price of an empty bottle.