 |
| Drinking from a nasoni |
Remember that carafe I got from the l'Eau de Paris? Now I'm investigating Rome's water scene. First, it's the
nasoni. These are the water spigots that you can plug up with you finger so that the water spouts out of the top for a drinking fountain. The water is supposed to be very good so that you can drink it without any qualms and there are 2,500 of them around the city so you should never go thirsty. (Now if only there were that many public toilets...)
The ACEA (Rome's municipal water authority) not only provides
maps of the nasoni in Rome but now has an
app to help you locate them. The water from the
nasoni is the same water that comes out of the tap in Rome but since they run constantly the water is always cool. Don't worry, the excess water is recycled for use in Rome's parks. Even with this excellent source of water at their fingertips, Romans in restaurants prefer bottled water, although there is a movement against all those plastic water bottles (the PET version). On Fodor's online forum, one contributor says: "It is the custom to order bottled water in Roman restaurants. To ask for tap water [
l'acqua del rubinetto] is like asking for a doggie bag; it simply isn't done." The Italians have to maintain "La Bella Figura".
So what kind of bottled water should we order in a restaurant? Your waiter usually asks you, "Acqua con gas o senza gas?" Should it be fizzy (frizzante) or still (liscia o naturale)?
Lazio Explorer, an English expatriate named Peter, says his Italian in-laws consider Acqua di
Nepi to be the best quality and "that while I'm not usually a fan of frizzante, Acqua di Nepi frizzante (the green label) is wonderfully sweet with a soft sparkle". Others say to order the fizzy stuff to make sure that the restaurant didn't just fill up bottles with tap water, passing it off as bottled. That's fine with me since I prefer fizzwater, it settles the stomach, and according to Mary Roach, the author of
Gulp, it's the best thing for upset stomachs, alka seltzer being liable to cause an explosion.
When speaking of Water in Rome, I suppose one should mention the 11 aqueducts of ancient Rome, after all that is how the water got to the nasoni (not really: nasoni are from the 19th century). According to
Wikipedia: "Their combined capacity was capable of supplying at least 1,127,220 cubic meters (nearly 300 million gallons) of water to the city each day from the Apennine mountains."
When the invading barbarians cut the aqueducts, that was the end of Rome and the population fell from over a million to about 30,000. It was not until the Renaissance that some of the popes undertook the restoration of the aqueducts. You can read more about Water and Wastewater Systems in Imperial Rome at
waterhistory.org. And we can also go visit the
Parco degli Acquedotti which is part of the Appian Way Regional Park (which I hope we manage to visit along with the Baths of Caracalla) and can be reached by taking the Metro line A to Lucio Sestio or Giulio Agricola. We can follow the detailed instructions from
davlynmitaly's blogspot, a blog which I'll have to explore and which has a blogroll of other blogs on Italy. And which provided that lovely October photo of the ancient acqueduct.
