Aqueducts’ Defenders Volunteer to Fill Breach in Upkeep of Park
ROME — In their day, Rome’s aqueducts — 11 elevated pipelines that carried more than 3,400 gallons of water per second to the ancient capital — stood as the height of public administration, providing the “best water service in the ancient world and perhaps of any era,” in the words of one archaeologist, Filippo Coarelli.
Today, what remains of the aqueducts has come to stand for something else: the challenges Italy faces in preserving its past while extensive cutbacks in public funding are eroding the maintenance of Italy’s cultural heritage and parks.
The effect is visible in the Park of the Aqueducts, a site near the Cinecittà film studios in Rome that includes some of the city’s most monumental, if little-known, ruins: the remains of six aqueducts dating to antiquity, and one to the Renaissance.
For years, the public institutions in charge of the park — a jumble of municipal, regional and national entities — were unable to adequately maintain the 590-acre area, which is mostly privately owned. Then, five years ago, a handful of older residents, calling themselves the Volunteers of the Park of the Aqueducts, adopted the park as their retirement hobby.
They spend hours pruning and weeding and clearing garbage to liberate clogged and long-forgotten streams. They plant fruit trees and have created miles of dirt paths for bicycles and joggers.
“We wanted to improve an area that had been left to itself,” said Luciano Di Vico, 67, a former manager with a natural gas company who serves as the group’s leader.
“This is where we found two cars, a boat trailer, a marble Roman sink, several supermarket carts, even a slot machine,” Mr. Di Vico said on a recent fall morning, pointing to a small hollow the group had cleared.
Volunteer groups “are the soul of the park,” said Mario Tozzi, the commissioner of the Regional Park for the Appian Way, an area of around 8,400 acres that extends from the center of Rome to outside the city limits.
“If it weren’t for them, for their fierce defense, the green areas that now comprise the park wouldn’t even exist,” Mr. Tozzi said. The regional park includes the Park of the Aqueducts, as well as estates and areas where other volunteer groups operate.
The regional park was created in 1988 to protect a monument-rich area from the deregulated urban development that spurred Rome’s postwar sprawl. Because of volunteer groups, Mr. Tozzi said, “this slice of ancient Rome managed to escape from modern Rome, which hasn’t behaved all that well, gobbling up what it could.”
Even so, the remains of the aqueducts have gotten little respect. The Volunteers of the Park of the Aqueducts has tried to change that.
Given the few volunteers and the vast size of the park, it is a Sisyphean feat. No sooner do they take their hoes and rakes to one overgrown patch, then another area they had already cleared needs tending.
Their main challenges are the modern marauders who regularly pillage and destroy the results of their labor. Culprits have made off with fruit from trees “when they’re still not ripe, they’re not even tasty,” Mr. Di Vico said.
Vandals have dismantled wooden bicycle racks to use as tinder for barbecues. They have repeatedly broken into the information booth to steal wheelbarrows and have destroyed a vegetable garden created by schoolchildren. They have even dumped garbage from the bins to make off with the garbage bags. “They stole the bag,” Mr. Di Vico said. “How can that even cross one’s mind?”
“It’s a cultural problem to get people to understand what they have,” he said. “They treat the park as something that can be abandoned.”
He and his crew monitor the vandalism through the small army of older parkgoers who take daily walks. “I have my informers,” Mr. Di Vico said, though he admitted that older people “are the worst predators when it comes to flowers.”
Other volunteer groups have been similarly active. The Associazione Tor Fiscale, named for a 13th-century tower built near two of the aqueducts, began cleaning a different abandoned tract of the Regional Park for the Appian Way in 2000. The association is now managing a restaurant inside the park to subsidize its activities.
“Something abandoned has become precious,” said Gloria Mazzamati, leader of the association. “The city didn’t even know that this possibility existed. Now people are coming from all over the world to see the aqueducts. They are a spectacle to foreign eyes.”
Orchestrating parkwide management is a challenge because the park is mostly private property, largely owned by the heirs of Rome’s noble families — which farm much of the land — and a church foundation, along with a few public institutions, like the region and the city.
Although they are generally well liked, the aqueduct volunteers have at times run afoul of the rules.
Two years ago, they began clearing some of the arches of the Aqua Claudia of the trees and bushes that hid them from view. “People would pass by and thank us,” said Bruno De Giusti, a volunteer, who grumbled that archaeology officials had not been taking better care of the monuments.
But park guards soon stopped them. “You can’t delegate such a delicate task as cleaning to volunteers,” said Rita Paris, who is responsible for the regional park on behalf of the Culture Ministry. “It has to be done under the control of experts.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Ms. Paris said. “Thank goodness these volunteers exist, but the care and maintenance of these sites must be left to public institutions. The committees are active, and they bring forward battles, but they’re not a real solution.”
In a compromise, the volunteers have been permitted to get rid of some types of weedy plants — nettles and reeds, for example — but must get authorization for other, more ambitious projects. The bureaucracy has not deterred Mr. Di Vico and his group, and they have posted handwritten notices to recruit more volunteers.
But, he said, they would not mind a little money to cover their expenses. They have bought dozens of plants, hammers and hoes and a seemingly endless number of wheelbarrows. “The park supports us morally, and with love, but that’s it.”
Asked about money, Mr. Tozzi, the park commissioner, was succinct. “There just isn’t any money,” he said. “Our budget is zero.”
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