3-038-962 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The floods at Rome: the Piazza del Popolo, 1871. Engraving of a photograph '...looking over the Piazza del Popolo to the opposite side of the Tiber, where the majestic dome of St. Peter's, and the extensive pile of the Vatican beside it, fill the background...The overflow of the Tiber, from the sudden melting of the snow in the Apennine mountain country, inundated great part of the city, three days after Christmas Day, and caused much distress to the inhabitants...not only the Ripetta, but the Piazza del Popolo and the Corso, for a length of three quarters of a mile, as far as the central Piazza Colonna, were flooded to a depth of six or eight feet. It is said that no former inundation, since the sixteenth century, has been so great...The Corso was traversed by boats and rafts...The people in the houses were supplied with provisions by letting down baskets from their upper windows...the Piazza del Popolo looked like a lake, with two great torrents of water pouring into it from the Ripetta and the Corso. In the middle stood the Egyptian obelisk and the four lions of the fountain, still above water, the lions' mouths continuing to pour out their contribution, which is usually received by the four marble basins of the fountain'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.