The Water Supply System of Siena, Italy: The Medieval Roots of the Modern Networked City

The United Nations declared 2003 the “International Year of Freshwater.” It was only fitting that I began the process of revising this manuscript for publication in that year. The residents of medieval Siena found a brilliant, and for its day, “high-tech” system of water supply that had minimal impacts on the environment. If a millennium of continuous operation is evidence of a sustainable system, then one could describe Siena’s system with that increasingly popular term. One need only contrast it with the worrisome trend of “mining” glacial deposits of water around the world. Edward Goldsmith described the lessons such systems could teach us today in his aptly titled, “Learning to Live with Nature.” There is much we can learn from Siena.