There is a fountain outside my building on Via Marmorata that has been running, without pause, for longer than anyone can tell me. Water comes out of a curved iron pipe shaped like a nose – a nasone, the Romans call it. The first week I filled my bottle there out of thirst. By the fourth, out of something closer to loyalty.
I came to Rome to draw buildings, not to think about travel. But architecture school had trained me to photograph first and understand later – snap the façade, move on. Sketching asks the opposite: sit until your hand understands what your eye only glanced at. It is a slower way of seeing, and I came to think it is also the more sustainable one – travel measured in attention rather than sites ticked off.
The nasoni are part of an aqueduct system that has moved water through this city with almost no interruption since before Britain had a written language. No plastic bottle has ever been necessary here; Rome solved single-use water two thousand years before it became a line on a UN goals poster. Refilling mine daily instead of buying more plastic felt small, but it is exactly the kind of ordinary choice SDG 12 – Responsible Consumption and Production – asks travellers to make: not grand gestures, just fewer discardable things.
My commute became the same lesson. My university sits across the river in Monteverde, and every morning I chose between the 280 and the 44 – buses I learned to catch from memory instead of calling a taxi or opening an app. Rome’s public transport exists precisely so a car is a choice here, not a necessity, which is SDG 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities – made visible in a timetable rather than a policy document.[1]
I bought vegetables at the covered market under Monte Testaccio, five minutes from my door, where the queue was Roman, not touristic – which turned out to mean eating seasonally: artichokes in April giving way to zucchini flowers by the time I left, because the stallholder had nothing else to sell. Nobody there had heard of a supply chain audit. They had heard of a good crop, which is the same discipline dressed differently.
On my last evening I sat at the folding table in my kitchen and ate the last of a peach bought that morning at the market – almost too ripe, the kind of sweetness that lasts a day, which is presumably why nobody exports it. I thought about whoever might read this, deciding whether a fountain and two bus numbers are worth six hundred pounds. I hope they taste the peach a little too – the smallest, most perishable things are exactly what sustainable travel is made of.
I filled my bottle at the nasone once more before leaving. The water was the same temperature it had been on the first day. I was not.
Resources:
[3] UN SDG 12 & 11, sdgs.un.org
