Back in Nineteen Thirteen, William Mulholland completed the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 233-mile engineering masterwork transporting water from the Owens Valley, a dry lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada across the desert to a barren south-western corner of California that would become the home of filmmaking, and transformed the land’s fertility. In Aqua, award winning, Italian filmmaker and writer Chiara Barzini gives insight into the founding of Hollywood, the building of great water systems. Her hometown Rome, abound with empty aqueducts and pipes, representing someone’s dream of turning dry soil into a fertile lucrative and fertile agricultural land.

On January  7, 2025, Los Angeles is burning , the Santa Ana winds, with the drought and the inadequate flow from the fire hydrants, result in one of the worst fires of recent years is highlighted  by Barzini in Aqua. The Eaton fire destroyed 12, 000 houses, businesses and structures were wiped out and more than 150, 000 people lost their homes. Had the fire hydrants worked better, had water flowing freely through the underwater systems that criss-cross the city, the inferno might have been mitigated.  According to Barzini, the moment Mullholland emptied Owens Lake into the City of Angels, he set the city on a course of mismanagement, greed and corruption.

Los Angeles is a dream city, one that could not have happened without Mulholland’s engineering marvel, as his aqueduct enabled so much water to flow into LA that early movie directors were able to create spectacular  seas in inside movie lots to stage nautical battles. In 46BC Rome, Julius Caesar used the Aqua Alsietina to stage mock sea battles in dug-out basins known as naumachie.

Los Angeles had no harbour, no railway and no gold, only mountains and deserts that shuf it off from the rest of the continent. Belfast born Mulholland arrived in LA in 1878, with no job or training  met with a well digger who needed help. He studied diagrams of the aqueducts of the Roman Empire their construction stretched over five centuries. In 1904, a drought gripped LA, when Mulholland, then superintendent of the city’s water system, Barzini writes “ He would cleave the desert and lead the promised waters to them.”

The Hoover Dam, the other great water engineering project of the western United States, promised everlasting flow. The dropping of the Colorado river due to overuse and climate change has turned “the age of great expectations into an “Era of Limits” writes Barzini.

Aqua: A Story of Water and Lost Dreams by Chiara Barzini, Canongate £16.99, 304 pages.