The beauties of Umbria’s many water sites were well known to artists, as was the difficulties involved in depicting them. Our selection of printed images dating from the 18th century to the early 20th century depicts the Tiber, the Clitunno Springs – with their Virgilesque white oxen – the ruins of the Bridge of Augustus in Narni, the Marmore Waterfalls, Lake Trasimeno and Lake Piediluco.
Moving down the Tiber we find Città di Castello, in Salmon’s engraving, the Umbertide Bridge, in Guerrini’s text, the fisherman at Ponte S. Giovanni depicted by Wallis, Mortier’s Todi and, just outside Umbria, Orte engraved by Pieter Van der Aa. John Smith’s late 18th century drawings are of places on the Grand Tour: Lake Trasimeno or Lake Perugia, as it was normally called until Italian Unification, the Clitunno temple and springs, Spoleto castle, with Ponte delle Torri and the river below, the Marmore Waterfalls, Terni valley, Lake Piediluco, Bridge of Augustus and the Medieval Bridge in Narni.
The beauties of Umbria’s ‘blue heart’ did not escape Paul Adrien Bouroux whose delightful etching shows Ponte S. Vetturino, over the Tescio stream, with Sacro Convento di Assisi towering over it, while Spaniard Jaime Morera was enchanted by a fishing boat on Lake Trasimeno and its singular little fire probably lit to roast the fish right there and then.
Lake Trasimeno and its status as a ‘saved’ lake which remained in permanent danger, are the subject not only of some of the landscapes, in Arcadian and Romantic style, but also of many contemporary documents on its water controls. Drainage of the lake was put forward on many occasions and several surveys and projects were drawn up to implement this drastic ‘solution’ to its periodic extreme differences in water level and the presence of marshland with all that this meant in health risk terms. Plans to drain the lake and reduce its size were repeatedly considered in both pre- and post-unification times, at the behest of landowners in river areas wanting to increase the size of their estates. Fortunately the lake was ‘saved’ and the risk of it flooding its banks was averted by the building of a new outlet in 1896-8 by a reclamation consortium presided over by Guido Pompili whose plans are shown here together with a document on the celebrations for its opening on 2nd October 1898.