Abstract
At a time when European cities depended on three sources of fresh water for their domestic and industrial needs—rivers, spring-fed aqueducts and groundwater wells—early modern Venice added a fourth possibility: a dense network of cisterns for capturing, filtering and storing rainwater. Venice was not unique in relying on rainwater cisterns; but nowhere in Italy (indeed in Europe) was the approach so systematic and widespread, the city concerned so populous, the technology so sophisticated and the management so carefully regulated as in the lagoon city. To explore Venice’s cistern-system, a range of primary sources (medical treatises, travellers’ accounts, archival records) and the contributions of architectural, medical and social historians, and archaeologists are analysed. The article examines the system’s functioning and management, including the role of the city’s acquaroli or watermen; the maintenance of freshwater quality throughout the city, in the context of broader sanitation measures; and the place of the “wells” and fresh water in daily life in Venice. As a means of teasing out the myriad links between nature, technology and society in early modern Italy, the article concludes with a brief comparison of the politics of water supply management in the very different urban realities of (republican) Venice, (viceregal) Naples and (papal) Rome.
Highlights
In the sixteenth century Venice was one of Europe’s liveliest and most cosmopolitan cities, but in 1575–77 it suffered its worst plague epidemic, which is estimated to have killed more than a quarter of the city’s population, numbering some 180,000 on the eve of the epidemic (Preto 1978, p. 112)
In line with the medical thinking of the time, this was put down to a range of environmental factors, such as the accumulation of filth which resulted in the “corruption of the air and water” and the build-up of disease-causing “miasmas” (Palmer 1978, pp. 238–279; Sansa 2002; Wheeler 2007; Cohn 2010, pp. 124–128; Henderson 2010)
At a time when European cities depended on three sources of fresh water for their domestic and industrial needs—rivers, spring-fed aqueducts and groundwater wells (Roche 1984, p. 385)—Venice added a fourth possibility
Summary
In the sixteenth century Venice was one of Europe’s liveliest and most cosmopolitan cities, but in 1575–77 it suffered its worst plague epidemic, which is estimated to have killed more than a quarter of the city’s population, numbering some 180,000 on the eve of the epidemic (Preto 1978, p. 112). High in Arian’s mind was the need for supplies of safe, fresh water especially during times of plague—a link to Raimondo over two centuries later When it comes to the smaller-scale domestic cistern of the Mediterranean, it is likely that the decision to build one influenced how the adjacent building was constructed and where it was situated Because Venice’s supply of rainwater was not always enough, as Sanudo pointed out, from the city’s early days the watermen were responsible for bringing in supplies of fresh river water—the second key element of the Venetian cistern-system. From 1498, as a kind of tax on their operations, the health officers required the acquaroli to provide 100 barge-loads of water free to the city’s public cisterns and charitable institutions (Vanzan Marchini 1995, I: 132). While the constituent elements of this system remained more or less constant throughout the early modern period, the technology behind it evolved and adapted, within the constraints of the period
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