11 Facts About Roman aqueducts

In cities and towns, the waste water from Roman aqueducts watered gardens or scoured the drains and public sewers.

Cities and towns throughout the Roman Empire emulated this model, and funded aqueducts as objects of public interest and civic pride, "an expensive yet necessary luxury to which all could, and did, aspire".

Water from Roman aqueducts was used to supply villas, ornamental urban and suburban gardens, market gardens, farms, and agricultural estates, the latter being the core of Rome's economy and wealth.

Trastevere, the city region west of the Tiber, was primarily served by extensions of several of the city's eastern Roman aqueducts, carried across the river by lead pipes buried in the roadbed of the river bridges, thus forming an inverted siphon.

Inevitably, there would have been rancorous and interminable court cases between neighbours or local governments over competing claims to limited water supplies but on the whole, Roman aqueducts communities took care to allocate shared water resources according to need.

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Greek and Roman aqueducts physicians were well aware of the association between stagnant or tainted waters and water-borne diseases, and held rainwater to be water's purest and healthiest form, followed by springs.

The gradients of temporary Roman aqueducts used for hydraulic mining could be considerably greater, as at Dolaucothi in Wales and Las Medulas in northern Spain.

Roman aqueducts claimed to know not only how much was stolen, but how it was done.

Some Roman aqueducts supplied water to industrial sites, usually via an open channel cut into the ground, clay lined or wood-shuttered to reduce water loss.

In time, some of the city's damaged Roman aqueducts were partly restored, but the city's population was much reduced and impoverished.

The skill in building Roman aqueducts was not lost, especially of the smaller, more modest channels used to supply water wheels.