Fontana romana di Corso Roma

A slab of ordinary-looking street furniture on Corso Roma turns out to be working Roman engineering: a rectangular public fountain cut from stone, still traceable to the lead pipe that fed it from the hills. Unearthed by chance during 1980s excavations, it opens a window onto the daily water supply of Aquae Statiellae, a town built around its springs.

Why it matters

The fountain was part of the daily water supply of ancient Aquae Statiellae, standing near a private house in the blocks close to the forum. The municipal archaeological inventory dates it to the early imperial age, roughly the first to second century AD, and it owes its survival to an accident of modern construction — excavations in the 1980s for work on the street brought it back to light. Its discovery preserves a record of the ancient city's street-level infrastructure.

What to notice

The rectangular basin is assembled from stone slabs fixed with metal clamps; clamp holes remain visible at the edges. A lead pipe, or fistula, supplied it from the aqueduct, and the municipal description notes that a long stretch of this conduit survives. The fountain stood beside a domus, an upper-class house whose perimeter wall remains visible in the area, near the forum. Its remains document the meeting of water infrastructure, private housing and public space.

Context and history

Aquae Statiellae grew from a settlement of the Ligurian Statielli into a Roman town during the second and first centuries BC, connected by the Via Aemilia Scauri and known for thermal springs that Pliny the Elder ranked among the finest known to Rome. Monumental water infrastructure followed: an aqueduct of roughly twelve kilometres carried water from the Erro valley into town, and public fountains like this one distributed it at street level. The fountain's discovery in the 1980s added a rare, precisely located piece to that picture, because it was excavated in situ rather than moved. Its association with a nearby domus shows how the aqueduct served both domestic and public use in the same block.