13. November 2025 18:00 Uhr (MEZ)
Katherine Rinne (USA) – Water, Fountains, and Social Currency in Late-sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Rome
Online lecture
Cordial Invitation
to the Online Lecture (ZOOM) on 13.11.2025, 6:00 pm (CET)
Kathrine Rinne, USA
Water, Fountains, and Social Currency in Late-sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Rome
(Lecture in English)
Photo: Fontana della Piazza Colonna, from Le Fontane Publiche
delle Piazze delle Roma Moderna. Giuseppe Vergelli, 1690.
Katherine Rinne is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Cultural Landscapes in the department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia. She received the Masters of Architecture degree from U. C. Berkeley and worked for 10 years in professional practice and for 10 years as a Senior Lecturer in Architecture California College of the Arts. As an independent scholar she has devoted her research to the history of Rome’s water infrastructure. She has published widely, including The Waters of Rome: Aqueduct, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City (Yale University Press, 2010), which won the 2012 Spiro Kostof Award for Urban History from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her most recent book, Walking Rome’s Waters (Yale University Press, 2025), is a topographic and cultural history that follows water’s flow–springs, aqueducts, fountains, drains, sewers, and the Tiber River–from the ancient to the contemporary city.
Katherine Rinne about her lecture:
As a result of the restorations of partial restorations of ancient aqueducts, and new construction, the Acqua Vergine (1560 to 1570), Acqua Felice (1585 to 1587), and Acqua Paola (1607 to 1612), water was widely available in late-sixteenth and seventeenth century Rome. Each project was sponsored by a reigning pope – Pius V, Sixtus V and Paul V, respectively – who used the rhetoric of rational urban planning and redevelopment, and the promise of increased public access to pure water to justify construction. A Water Committee administered its distribution to public fountains, and to cardinals, nobles, civil magistrates, important private individuals, and charitable institutions. This talk explores how water quickly became coin – a liquid currency that flowed continuously into the city – to bestow, purchase, trade, sell, or give away. Water not only flowed through gravity from the highest to the lowest elevations, but also through a functional gravity, that is, from ornamental to quotidian uses; and a social gravity from popes to cardinals, nobles and magistrates, and then to the public in a trickle-down process that enhanced the cityscape and solidified papal power and prestige.
The access data for the online meeting (ZOOM) are as follows:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87933930044?pwd=dlk4REZ4S0NnL3k2RGN2TVdtZTd3Zz09
Meeting-ID: 879 3393 0044
Kenncode: 631844
13. November 2025 18:00 o'clock (CET)
Katherine Rinne (USA) – Water, Fountains, and Social Currency in Late-sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Rome
Online lecture
Cordial Invitation
to the Online Lecture (ZOOM) on 13.11.2025, 6:00 pm (CET)
Kathrine Rinne, USA
Water, Fountains, and Social Currency in Late-sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Rome
(Lecture in English)
Photo: Fontana della Piazza Colonna, from Le Fontane Publiche
delle Piazze delle Roma Moderna. Giuseppe Vergelli, 1690.
Katherine Rinne is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Cultural Landscapes in the department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia. She received the Masters of Architecture degree from U. C. Berkeley and worked for 10 years in professional practice and for 10 years as a Senior Lecturer in Architecture California College of the Arts. As an independent scholar she has devoted her research to the history of Rome’s water infrastructure. She has published widely, including The Waters of Rome: Aqueduct, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City (Yale University Press, 2010), which won the 2012 Spiro Kostof Award for Urban History from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her most recent book, Walking Rome’s Waters (Yale University Press, 2025), is a topographic and cultural history that follows water’s flow–springs, aqueducts, fountains, drains, sewers, and the Tiber River–from the ancient to the contemporary city.
Katherine Rinne about her lecture:
As a result of the restorations of partial restorations of ancient aqueducts, and new construction, the Acqua Vergine (1560 to 1570), Acqua Felice (1585 to 1587), and Acqua Paola (1607 to 1612), water was widely available in late-sixteenth and seventeenth century Rome. Each project was sponsored by a reigning pope – Pius V, Sixtus V and Paul V, respectively – who used the rhetoric of rational urban planning and redevelopment, and the promise of increased public access to pure water to justify construction. A Water Committee administered its distribution to public fountains, and to cardinals, nobles, civil magistrates, important private individuals, and charitable institutions. This talk explores how water quickly became coin – a liquid currency that flowed continuously into the city – to bestow, purchase, trade, sell, or give away. Water not only flowed through gravity from the highest to the lowest elevations, but also through a functional gravity, that is, from ornamental to quotidian uses; and a social gravity from popes to cardinals, nobles and magistrates, and then to the public in a trickle-down process that enhanced the cityscape and solidified papal power and prestige.
The access data for the online meeting (ZOOM) are as follows:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87933930044?pwd=dlk4REZ4S0NnL3k2RGN2TVdtZTd3Zz09
Meeting-ID: 879 3393 0044
Kenncode: 631844