The ancient Greeks created beautiful public fountains as sources of drinking water, but it was the ancient Romans, with their system of aqueducts supplying large volumes of water, who first made fountains into important garden ornaments. Water played such an important role at the villa which the Emperor Hadrian created at Tivoli, that the entire villa could be called a water garden. Roman aqueducts were difficult and expensive to maintain, so when the western half of the Roman Empire collapsed, aqueducts which had been damaged by wars or earthquakes were not repaired and the system fell into neglect. Water was still necessary for drinking and washing, so fountains continued to be created during the Middle Ages, but they didn't have the sort of water pressure that aqueducts had provided. What little information we have about Medieval fountains indicates that while the fountains might be elaborately decorated, they were usually just water pipes flowing into a basin.
It was only during the Renaissance, as ancient aqueducts were repaired and new aqueducts were constructed, that engineers began to ornament European gardens with fountains which rivaled or surpassed what they knew about the fountains of ancient Rome. The garden which Cardinal Ippolito d'Este (1509-72) created at Tivoli between 1560 and 1572 was filled with statues taken from the nearby ruins of Hadrian's Villa and it may have surpassed that ancient villa in its lavish use of fountains. The the Villa d'Este's fountains were fed from two principal sources - an aqueduct from Mont Sant' Angelo and a conduit which diverted water from the River Aniene. These supplied a constant flow of water at 1,200 litters per second. Water features often played a central role in the gardens of Renaissance Italy, but the Villa d'Este set the standard that all later gardens were judged against.
When Francesco de'Medici began his garden at Pratolino, near Florence, he seems to have seen the site's lack of water as an advantage; it was an opportunity to display his power over nature. In order to supply fountains which were intended to rival those of the Villa d'Este, an aqueduct was constructed which brought in water from twelve different springs which are located in two different areas of Monte Senario, eight kilometers away from the garden. This garden, which was begun in 1569, was transformed into an English style landscape garden in the nineteenth century; only the gigantic statue of the Appennino remains to remind us that at the end of the sixteenth century, this was probably the most famous garden in Europe.
