The Aqueduct Hunters

Ted O’Neill

Ted is the narrator and film director of the Aqueduct Hunting story.

After working for both the BBC in the UK and the Italian Broadcaster Mediaset; Ted decided that filming content and making our own programmes was the only way to go.

What inspires him the most in our current project is taking our high definition cameras and lights deep into rocky canyons, pitch black tunnels, and bringing back many hours of footage.

With a high performance editing suite, the hours of footage are pared down into maybe just a few seconds of breathtaking film, and inch-by-inch, centuries of history are brought back to life.

Mike O’Neill

With a passion for Film Making and a thirst for knowledge, Mike started the Aqueduct project in 2008, and has been burrowing through the archives like a turbo charged mole ever since.

Mike has evolved the theory that the Aqua Traiana Coin, long declared to be a representation of the Mostra in Rome, is much more probably diagramatic of the Santa Fiora Nymphaeum as a water source with the water flowing out through the cuniculi under the floor.

What on earth will he discover next in those dusty archives?

Professor Lorenzo Quilici

An Aqueduct Hunting Legend in his own lifetime, Professor of Topography Lorenzo Quilici, Master of Studies at the University of Bologna, is the leading authority on the Aqua Virgo. Together with his wife, Stefania Quilici Gigli, he is an authority on the vie consulari the radial "consular " roads leading to Rome from around Italy and the Roman Empire.

Professor Quilici has written many books on Roman Archaeology, Buildings and Aqueducts.

Professor Allan Ceen

The true adventurer, Allan Ceen is always the first to leap into any tunnel or swing down a hole into the depths of ancient Rome. Allan is also a passionate scholar of the history of ancient, medieval, renaissance and baroque Rome and a fierce advocate for its conservation.

Allan is also an acknowledged expert and unique scholar of the historic maps of Rome, and the map-makers Leonardo Buffalini and Giambattista Nolli. He has curated the University of Oregon projects to digitise the 1748 map of Rome by Giambattista Nolli, and the contemporary engravings of Rome by Giuseppe Vasi; two masterpieces of digital media.

Rabun Taylor

Rabun is the young Turk of the world of archaeologists, and is known for his maverick theories that make the world of conventional archaeologists shiver and shake.

His theories have been an inspiration to the Aqueduct Hunting team, and it was his study of Augustus' Naumachia and the Aqua Alsietina which led Mike and Ted to first begin exploring in the volcanic region of the Bracciano Lakes.

Rabun is a Texan by adoption and eats a diet of rattlesnake ribs, T-bones, fajitas and re-fried beans. He comes to Rome to escape the Texan sunshine.

Katherine W. Rinne

Fascinated by water since her childhood, Katherine is an Independent Scholar and adjunct professor of architecture at California College of the Arts.

Californian by birth and Roman by heart, Katherine spends every spare second of her time in and around Rome’s seven hills and likes nothing more than to drink cold Acqua Marcia water from one of Rome's fabled nasone fountains.

Katherine's book The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City (Yale University Press: 2011) has recently been published.