The Aqua Alexandrina was the last of the great Roman aqueducts, a final, ambitious feat of hydraulic engineering before the empire’s slow decline. It ran for 22.4 kilometres from Pantano Borghese, a marshy source southeast of the city, to the Baths of Alexander in the Campus Martius. For five centuries, from the third to the eighth century AD, it supplied water to one of Rome’s grand public bathing complexes, a place where citizens gathered to wash, exercise, and socialise. Roman aqueducts were extraordinary works: gravity-fed channels, often tunnelled through hills or carried on soaring arcades, that delivered fresh water across vast distances. The Alexandrina’s route is now largely lost beneath modern development, but its purpose remains clear, a monument to the Roman conviction that a city’s lifeblood is its water. What survives of its fabric speaks less of triumph than of tenacity, a quiet reminder of the infrastructure that made urban civilisation possible.
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