386
PARTISAN REVIEW
lanes running between high uneven overgrown walls, with donkeys
and troughs and bits of ruins left to themselves, and rough little
eating places in
a.
profusion of birds and greenery. There is no word
for weekend; it is not necessary; you may want to get away from this
city sometimes but you would never think of needing to get
out
of it.
He~e
across from the gate, also from an iron gate leading to
Garibaldi on his horse-on the Passeggiata del Gianicolo-there is no
fountain, only a spigot from a kind of hydrant that spills night and
day into an old wooden tub and eventually down a drain. But there
is another water aspect. Along the old road to the north that starts
from here, the Via Aurelia Antica, that drowsy sunken lane that leads
you out of the city as from a secret garden that you have come on
by accident and will probably never find again, runs the acqueduct
begun by Augustus to bring the water in from Lake Bracciano, and
called at different times the Alsietina and the Traiana; then in the
Renaissance when all the spigots and faucets began being turned on
again it became the Acqua Paola, after the Pope whose arch straddles
the road with that charming Roman air of having a purpose, where
none is visible or imaginable. The water, which is chalky and the
least good of the Roman waters for drinking-but there is as much
rivalry about them as over qualities of diamonds in a mining town
and you never know whom to believe-runs in pipes under the road
now, so the only practical use of the old arches is to frame one of
the nicest views of the Dome: just beyond the Pope's gateway it ap–
pears as a huge inverted and stemless egg-cup resting lightly on a
field of cabbages.
This acqueduct has not the grand haunting broken stride of the
ones across the campagna. It stays close beside you all the way,
familiar, the arches becoming gradually filled in and finally just
fading out into a farmyard fence; but like the others it gives you an
image of what the city's true defenses always were: not walls, Servian,
Aurelian, papal or economic, but running water and the mind's need
of it; no army was ever as strong as that.
However it has other functions too and so there have to be
urinals, otherwise people would relieve themselves anywhere as they
do of
their
feelings and as the children do. The cafe proprietor's
grandson Rodolfo makes himself an object of delighted attention in
the piazza because he has to go so often. "Why he's a regular little
