The most elaborate and stringent laws were made for the guardianship of the fountain and the use of its waters. It was enclosed, as it is to-day, with iron railings, and was, as the ever sarcastic Bonazzi rightly says, "the subject of most grave solicitude." We hear that there were seven troughs which gathered the water outside the railing, but "beasts, barrels, unwashed pots, and unclean hands were forbidden the use of the water, and indeed this was guarded with such jealous care that it seemed as though the people of Perugia had built their fountain for the sake of beauty only.... Yet," adds Bonazzi, "the five hundred florins which were annually given over to its maintenance, without counting extra expenses and the wages of its special porters and superior officers, would have been ill-spent indeed if beauty had been missing in the monument."
But if it was difficult to bring the water it was equally difficult to keep it always running. The elegant pile of marbles, the thing that the _Podestà_, the priests and the people all combined in literally doting on, was for ever running dry, and growing lifeless. In this nineteenth century the Prefect of Perugia is about to send some forty miles instead of three to fetch his people water, but the great fountain will be there to hold it when it comes, and the first aqueduct will remain to break with exquisite lines the little copses and the fields away to the north of the city.
We know of few lovelier points about Perugia than the place where its water is stored on the lower hills of Monte Pacciano--low wooded hills where the
[Illustration: GEOMETRY. DETAIL IN A PANEL OF THE FOUNTAIN]
white heath grows in spring-time amongst the copses of crimson-stemmed arbutus, and where one can lie for hours on the turf looking away to Trasimene, and all the waving hills and smaller hill-set cities of the Umbrian country. Here the Perugians catch and store their drinking water in three great reservoirs. The first of these was built some time at the end of the thirteenth century. The masonry is rough and massive, and the water seems more green and more mysterious in the mediæval basin than in those of this practical nineteenth century. We went there late one April afternoon, and lingered long in the cool and cavernous places where the water is gathered together. As we came home we traced the course of the old aqueducts which have long since been abandoned. The springs to-day are carried underground in a sort of switch-back fashion over the sloping hillsides. But the ruins of the earlier conduit remain in their old places. Seeing them, we thought of the times in which they had supplied the men and horses crawling home from some hot skirmish on the plain, and of how the water had washed the blood of nobles from the steps of the Duomo and quenched the thirst of preaching friars and painters. How dead, how _gone_, that passionate past, how hum-drum, and how dreary seemed the clatter of the table d'hôte when we got back that evening.