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Abstract: A mapping of the availability of public water in sixteenth century Rome is a useful instrument for understanding the dynamics of the city’s development and especially in understanding the lines along which the built surface grew; it is a question of a programmed modernization of the city carried out through a well advised papal political strategy and also with an imposing economic commitment required by the hydraulic work. The exact distribution of springs, fountains, drinking fountains and troughs present in Rome before, and those constructed after the reactivation of the two aqueducts Vergine and Felice, emerges clearly from the sixteenth century cartography and the bibliographic and archival information. On the other hand, the greatest availability of water – that in the first decade of seventeenth century Rome was further augmented by the Paola aqueduct – corresponds with a population increase of 40,000. This article reconstructs an accurate picture of the location of water sources, without overlooking the contribution of the city’s principal resource, the unhealthy Tiber river.