How to get the step: Fontana dell’Acqua Acetosa
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You are along the route: THE FASCINATION OF THE CLASSICS. GOETHE AND CANOVA
Via Elia Enrico
Always visible.
On 5 July 1787, Goethe was in Rome and noticed that his current life was exactly the same a youthful dream. It was hot in Rome. The next day, he decided to go to the Fontana dell’Acqua Acetosa, a ferrous water source, especially loved by Pope Paul V, who built a fountain there in 1619, which was then restored by Pope Alexander VII to its current form: a stairway descending to an exedra. Goethe wrote:
Tomorrow morning, as the sun rises, I will go to Acqua Acetosa, a fountain with bitter water, about half an hour away from my house, and will drink the water which tastes like a weak Schwalbacher water, but which is very suited for this climate.
Then on 18 August:
Yesterday, before the sun rose, I went to Acqua Acetosa; one becomes madly excited when, especially from a distance, one sees the clearness, variety, luminous transparency and different tonalities of the countryside.
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