Between the years 1570 and 1630 water infrastructure was used to transform Rome from an essentially medieval city into a baroque one. During this time popes, cardinals, and other influential citizens restored ancient aqueducts and built new fountains with the intent of using water infrastructure as a tool to return Rome to its antique grandeur, solidify papal prestige, shift existing settlement patterns, stimulate economic development, and improve public health. Three gravity-flow aqueducts were built to serve Rome: the Acqua Vergine (1562-1570), Acqua Felice (1585-1587), and Acqua Paola (1607-1612). Each tapped ancient sources and restored ancient channels, and each served a particular watershed area. After a thousand years of finite resources Rome was awash with pure drinking water and by 1630 there were over seventy new public fountains. In this talk I will provide a brief overview of the topographic, social, technological and contextual issues associated with distributing the water from these three aqueducts around intramural Rome. I will demonstrated that the fountains (the most widely studied features of the baroque water system) were far more than urban ornaments, but were actually the most visually prominent features of a new, although largely hidden, physical order, built upon an integrated water infrastructure system that included aqueducts, conduits, distribution tanks, bridges, and sewers. This order existed at the scale of the neighbourhood and of the city, as water infrastructure provided an armature to organize, and effectively control public space, perhaps for the first time since antiquity, and also to restore the physical fabric, and the prestige of both the city and the church.