Part of my study abroad trip to London and Rome in September is a series of blog posts about some assigned readings, and reflections upon them. This is the third such post, and is one of five about Robert Hughes’ Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History.
“I was thunderstruck by the sight: the fountains, the vertical of the obelisk, but above all by the curve of Bernini’s double Doric colonnade. The idea of architecture of such scale and effort had never entered my mind before. … It blew away, in an instant, whatever half-baked notions of historical “progress” may have been rattling about, loosely attached to the insides of my skull.”
– except from the Prologue of Robert Hughes’ Rome
We think of ourselves as more advanced, superior to our ancestors, but when was the last time modern Western civilization built something as grand as the aqueducts of Rome? 
We can’t keep our bridges in good repair, and yet in 144 B.C.E. the Romans built the Aqua Marcia, a 91 kilometer aqueduct where 80 km of it was underground, parts of which are still in use as the Acqua Felice today. Hard to claim, when our bridges fall apart after only fifty years, that we really are more advanced then a culture that 2058 years ago built an aqueduct that is still, in portions, being used today.
It’s a weird notion of progress that we, as a society, have that seems to spring out of our focus today on disposable consumer goods. As a society we like to think we are greater, grander, superior to our ancestors but the only great things we build today, our largest and most enduring monuments, may be the giant landfills and heaps of trash we leave behind like the gyres of waste floating out at sea. It seems some days that the only thing we build or produce today that will have the longevity of the Roman aqueducts will be our trash, our plastic, cluttering up the landscape for centuries to come.