In 1992, a photocopy of Giambattista Nolli's famous map in hand, architect and urban designer Katherine Wentworth Rinne set out on a four-month walk through Rome to examine its fountains. The resulting monograph – some 18 years in gestation – is as lavishly produced as it is clearly written, with a beauty that defies its utilitarian message: that a fountain's primary function is to pour water into a basin or shoot a jet into the air; that its decoration is secondary, and often, in fact, dictated by functionality. Not that this lessens the book's impact for art historians as well as urban geographers. The author's decision to focus not on issues of iconography or patronage, but on the ways in which Rome's fountains respond to topographical constraints and low water-pressure has us see one of the most important forms of public urban sculpture in a new light and think about the cityscape as a whole, the relationship of the low-lying areas to the hills, and the built-up area to the Campagna. Surprisingly, perhaps, even in the 1620s, when Rome's fountains outdid those in any other European city, many residents were still without a dedicated drinking supply for themselves or their animals, or water for washing or industrial processes. Rinne does not restrict herself to difficulties of planning and construction but discusses the classification and use of fountains as well as pollution and the elite control of water.

Rinne focuses on the period between 1560 and the 1630s, when the repair of the aqueducts after centuries of relative neglect allowed Rome's juices to flow again, making the hills habitable and the medieval city a baroque showcase. Fountains were both a catalyst of this urban transformation and an offshoot of it – fundamental if Rome were to compete with Constantinople, where the Ottomans were devoting considerable resources to improving their water supply, and with its own imperial past – ancient Rome – after which Constantine's ‘new Rome’ had been modelled. Although Rinne's interest is in the mechanisms which allowed these waters to flow, and much of her discussion is for the connoisseur of fountains (the height of piazza and monument, the elevation of the water, distance between fountains), engineering never drowns out social and cultural concerns. Restoration of the Acqua Vergine, for example, is seen as crucial to the concept of renovatio Romae, advocated by Martin V and Nicholas V, eventually making Rome the unrivalled Renaissance paradigm.

All of this is set in sharp contrast to the fifteenth century, when ‘buildings were in ruins, streets were impassable, epidemics were inevitable, and wolves prowled outside the Vatican walls. Rome's once famous water infrastructure had vanished almost entirely’ (pp. 5–6). It would take a second book to lend flesh to this statement, but, as it stands, it risks underestimating the extent to which the success of renovatio and Renaissance demands prior sterility; and indeed the importance of paying due attention to the classical heritage on which this re-birth relies. Recently, scholars such as Robert Coates Stephens have pushed for a more diffuse occupation of the city in late antiquity and the Middle Ages than has been traditionally assumed, and have acknowledged (for example, David Karmon, who has also worked on the Acqua Vergine) that these periods were not wholly devoid of the impulse to preserve ancient artefacts.

One of the results of this framing is that classical antiquity is reduced to references to Frontinus and the rediscovery of his De aquaeductu urbis Romae (p. 43), written at the very end of the first century CE, most probably just after the death of the emperor Nerva and certainly not under Vespasian as Rinne claims, and to Julius Caesar's desire to shift the course of the River Tiber so as to lessen the risks associated with flooding (p. 22). It is not only that the second anecdote (Cicero, Letters to Atticus 13.33a; also important is 13.35–6) comes from a context which is fearful of the dictator's plans, and sees such plans as typical tyrannical behaviour, that makes this unfortunate, but that Caesar and other elite Romans explain much of the papal behaviour described in the book. Not only did the ancients build aqueducts, and fountains and basins in the streets of Rome and Pompeii, they also built elaborate piscinae and grottoes in their gardens. They reaped the benefits of putting streams and stone together and exploited the power to be gained from the ostentatious control of water. So powerful is this heritage that arguably only by immersing oneself in it can one grasp what makes Rome ‘Rome’ and a city a city.

Not that Rinne's decision to stay focused on the sixteenth century detracts from her aim to ‘lead to fresh thinking about technology and society, and about how Rome's fountain art related to urban development and urban infrastructure’ (p. viii). Who knew that even the paving of streets under Sixtus V was driven in part by the need to protect the new, expensive infrastructure of pipes and drains beneath? After reading her detailed narrative, it is hard not to walk these streets differently.