| has gloss | eng: The Acqua Felice is one of the aqueducts of Rome, completed in 1586 by Pope Sixtus V, whose birth name, which he never fully abandoned, was Felice Peretti. The first new aqueduct of Early Modern Rome, its source is at the springs at Pantano Borghese, off Via Casilina. Its length is fifteen miles, running underground for eight miles from its source, first in the channel of Aqua Alexandrina, then alternating on the arches of the Aqua Claudia and the Aqua Marcia for seven miles to its terminus at the Fontana dellAcqua Felice on the Quirinal Hill, standing to one side of the Strada Pia, so as to form a piazza in this new part of Rome. The engineer was Giovanni Fontana, brother of Sixtus engineer-architect Domenico Fontana, who recorded that the very day the new pope entered the Lateran, he decided that he would bring water once again to the healthful hills of Rome, which had remained waterless and sparsely inhabited, largely by monasteries, since the Roman aqueducts had been destroyed in the sixth century. |
