This technical image centers on an intersection between the city wall and the Giulia, Tepula, and Marcia Aqueducts. It includes an impossible view of a bisected aqueduct, in the upper right, and an illusionistic scroll set against a monotonous sky in the upper left. These paired illusions—the cross-section of an intact structure, the inset plan—are littered with frequent numerical and alphabetic annotation markers. All of the small images in this volume are, through their links to the Map of Rome, connected to a network of cross-references. This technically unsophisticated image, though, is so pervasively embedded in the volume’s networked structure that it almost becomes illegible.  

Its numerical annotations are explained in the caption (1, 2, 3, 4), but the corresponding text for its alphabetic annotations (A, B, C, D, E, and F) must be sought elsewhere, across four entries in the Index to the Map of Rome. Unlike any other image, the caption also points explicitly to the Index. There, he asserts that the aqueduct is “un magnifico monumento” [a magnificent monument] (Index to the Map of Rome, no. 23), refers to the annotations in the image when he records the three inscriptions that are visible but not legible here (A, B, C), comments on the construction methods and dating of the section of the wall (D), and refers to the Topographical Map of the Roman Aqueducts.  

This type of referential network mostly disappears in the following three volumes of Le Antichità Romane, where larger plates include images together with all their related text (Minor 2015, 36). A similar indexical structure also shapes, though, the archaeological volumes that focus on water management that Piranesi produced in the 1760s. It is not surprising that studies of ancient Rome’s complex water management systems employ complex methods of representation. And yet, Piranesi’s choices—annotated and indexed views, cross-referenced maps—insist on a particularly active use of books that requires users to access and integrate text and image.  

While the simplistic design and etching technique suggest that this image is likely the product of his workshop assistants, its vantage point appears again in a much more sophisticated image in Le Rovine del Castello dell’Acqua Giulia [Tav. VIII] (1761, Opere vol. 9).  
The annotation method of the later image will seem familiar to users of this volume of Le Antichità Romane: the annotation markers A-G that appear in the image are first identified in a separate typeset essay and then fully itemized in an explanation of each of the volume’s plates; many of those explanations, though, also refer to other vedute, cross-sections, and detailed close-ups of the aqueduct throughout the volume (Britton 2024). Although he drops the elaborate cross-references in following volumes of Le Antichità Romane, similar networks continue to shape his presentation of Rome’s systems of water management, even as his attention to visual effects increases. In the method of presenting image, information, and conjecture in this image, Piranesi summons active engagements with print media and its organizational methods that digital links can productively simulate. (JB)