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He should never have said such a thing! The date when the oil in the fountain appeared, which Dio Cassius put at 38 BC and Paulus Orosius at 29 or maybe 23 BC, was changed over the years by successive Christian writers until at last it was fixed at the very night in which Christ was born. And it was claimed that the oil sprang forth in the above-mentioned Taberna Meritoria – really a poorhouse (as an anonymous 16 th century writer has it) "where poor unfortunate soldiers, ruined by war and with missing limbs, found food and shelter until they died" – the exact spot on which the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere fountain would be built and where, nowadays, the site of this marvelous fountain marked near the Confessional. I leave the last word on the argument to a likeable but anonymous writer of the 15 th century:
"In the Taberna Meritoria, on the spot with those two little iron-barred windows near the choir, at the time when our Lord Jesus Christ deigned to be born of the Holy Virgin, a most abundant fount of oil issued forth miraculously from the ground and for the space of a day and a night flowed in a wide stream down into the Tiber".
But what is the truth of this "oil well"? A few years ago, a very well known archaeologist, believing there was some truth in the ancient fountain tradition (albeit taking it with a grain of salt) and with every confidence in a friend whose job was excavation, came out in support of the presence of petroleum in the area: petroleum that would "finally free us from our dreadful servitude". The notion – this particular "oil well fountain " apart – might well be true.
However, setting aside these as yet unverified oil wells, it is my more modest wish to refer again to the authoritative voice of the Latin author I have already quoted, i.e. Frontino, who was himself a "Curator aquarum" or, as we would now say, Director General for Watercourses, Fountains, and Aqueducts (about which he was very knowledgeable).
As we have seen, Frontino could not understand why, around a century earlier, Augustus would have brought in a supply of water to the fountains – the Aqua Alsietina – that was " not at all pleasing, but decidedly unhealthy and therefore not used by the people because it was definitely polluted" coming, as it did, from a lake. We have also seen that Fontino affirmed that the water supplied to the Trastevere fountains, including the one at Santa Maria (if, indeed, it existed in his day), was that same Aqua Alsietina, given that this may still have been the case in 1544.
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