What a fountain contains besides water: love, misfortune and fortune

"There is no fountain that is not sacred," said Mario Servius Honoratus, a Roman scholar from the 5th century AD. And that phrase moistens every page of The Murmur of Water. Fountains, Gardens and Aquatic Divinities (Acantilado) by the Spanish historian and anthropologist María Belmonte . Those "petals of the ocean," as the poet Pindar defined springs and other water flows that sprout from the earth two thousand five hundred years ago, appear in the Bible , adorned imperial villas and French palaces and are tourist attractions, be it the Trevi Fountain or the Los Duendes Waterfall in Bariloche. Nymphs, spirits, mysteries and promises mingle in these places, which the book distills with freshness.

According to Genesis , in Paradise there is a spring from which four rivers flow: Pison (Nile), Gihon (Ganges), Hiddekel (Tigris) and Phirat (Euphrates) . And these waters were the "veins of the earth", which fertilized the four cardinal points. That spring of Eden symbolized the knowledge and wisdom of God, and its slopes purified humans. And in Greek mythology, according to Ovid 's Metamorphoses , it is said that Dionysus revealed to King Midas that to free him from his curse and his greed, he must immerse his head in a foaming spring, in the sources that gave rise to the Pactolus River, in present-day Turkey.

“Our ancestors venerated and considered water sacred, a gift from the gods for the benefit of humans,” Belmonte recalls, refreshing us with the uninterrupted flow that highlights this element as essential.

According to the book, for the Hopi Indians , who lived in the present-day states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado in the U.S. , “every spring is a sacred place.” According to Hesiod , meanwhile, a spring that granted eternal youth was located in Ethiopia , and the myth survived, with the location of this wonderful, healing spring being imagined in various places.

Art represented the magnetism of these spaces. Lucas Cranach the Elder painted "The Fountain of Eternal Youth" in 1546, in which twenty naked women bathe in the pool that collects the miraculous waters that rise from the center of the Earth. Nearby, a banquet is being held, with musicians, a tent, and carts carrying old women to regain their strength. "The Fountain," by Dominique Ingres , from 1856, is another classic painting on the subject, depicting a nymph holding a pitcher from which water flows. Perhaps in response, Gustave Courbet painted the same motif in 1862, although in his work the woman, with her back to the viewer, embraces a waterfall.

Literature has also given space to springs. In Haruki Murakami 's *The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle* , one of the characters, endowed with "paranormal and divinatory powers, travels the world in search of springs from which wonderful waters flow, never finding the perfect one." Until he arrives on the island of Malta and finds what he longed for: a natural spring whose contents have been tasted by everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Keith Richards . Only in fiction, of course.

Belmonte's geographical and conceptual journey navigates especially through Greece and Italy . She recapitulates that for the ancient Greeks, "some fountains could drive you mad, while the water from others would restore you to sanity or make you a teetotaler for the rest of your life." Some temples, such as that of Asclepius , god of medicine, were built near natural springs of water. And in the sanctuary-city of Dodona , in northern Greece, the local priestess communicated her oracles inspired by the murmur of a spring that rose at the foot of an oak tree. In Delphi , meanwhile, was the fountain where the nymph Castalia lived, a place the author visits.

Pausanias, a Greek historian who lived in the second century AD , left behind a long list of the springs, wells, and fountains of his time, many of which still exist today. These places were so important to Hellenistic civilization that they even had their own deities, a special class of nymphs, the naiads, like Castalia.

Another myth tells of some of them seizing a young man, Hylas , and immersing him forever in a spring, driven mad by his beauty. In the same wake, Salmacis , a divinity of a pool, fell in love with another boy, Hermaphroditus , and embraced him with superhuman strength, plunging him into the waters and asking the gods never to separate him from her. Her celestial superiors complied.

In Rome , meanwhile, aqueducts, fountains, and public baths reigned supreme. At the entrances to the most luxurious Roman villas, there were often water spouts that demonstrated the owner's purchasing power. And Pliny the Elder dedicated Book 31 of his Natural History to freshwater springs and seawater . During the Renaissance , the most prestigious gardens featured grottoes, sculptures of aquatic deities, fountains, and automata, which created "a watery atmosphere of sensuality and mystery," as the author says.

Belmonte's book also delves into the most famous fountain, Rome's Trevi Fountain , which recreates a cliff from which water cascades into a basin, with Neptune at its center, riding a scallop-shaped chariot pulled by two winged seahorses. The ritual of throwing coins is apparently ancient, although according to the author it was once used to pray for better health or in gratitude for being cured of an illness. The little-remembered 1954 film "We Believe in Love" amplified the custom. And with Federico Fellini 's 1960 film "La Dolce Vita," the entire sculptural work was immortalized through the scene starring Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni .

Belmonte expresses that one day we will have to write "the elegy to the fountains that have disappeared, dried up, and contaminated." Or those with a shaky status, like the Monument to the Spanish in the heart of Palermo , which sometimes works and often doesn't.