Park of the Aqueducts, Rome – The Roma Vecchia Pond and the Superimposed Arcades of the Aqua Marcia and the Acqua Felice, Spring
The Roma Vecchia pond, in the clearing behind the farmhouse of the same name, within the Parco degli Acquedotti, a sector of the Appia Antica Regional Park in Rome's seventh municipal district. The basin is not of natural origin: it is fed by an outlet of the Acqua Felice aqueduct, built between 1585 and 1590 at the direction of Pope Sixtus V, born Felice Peretti, and still in service for irrigation. The discharged water forms the pond and continues along a channel that follows the course of the Acqua Mariana marrana, an artificial canal dug in 1122 under Pope Callixtus II to supply the southern sector of the city. The wall closing the scene on the right is one of the most legible sections of the park's hydraulic stratigraphy: at the bottom run the low tuff-block arches of the Aqua Marcia, a conduit built between 144 and 140 BC on the initiative of the praetor Quintus Marcius Rex and fed by springs in the upper Aniene valley; above it lies the horizontal band of travertine blocks and slabs enclosing the specus, and higher still the channel of the Acqua Felice, identifiable by its curved profile coated with mortar and by its direct seating on the ancient structure, following the sixteenth-century practice of reusing Roman substructures. The same masonry preserves portions of the brick flank of the Aqua Tepula (125 BC), while nothing remains visible of the Aqua Iulia (33 BC), which ran alongside the same route. The place name Roma Vecchia took hold in the Renaissance, when the quantity of ancient material surfacing between the Villa of the Quintilii and the Villa dei Sette Bassi led observers to suppose that a separate town had stood here; later investigation attributed the remains to large suburban residences along the via Latina. In the foreground is the wooden fence bounding the basin; in the background, the row of stone pines characteristic of the Roman countryside. Ground-level view, with the sun high and the grass cover at full growth: the exposure can be placed in the central hours of a spring day.
