Aqua: A Story of Water and Lost Dreams by Chiara Barzini, 2025
In 1913, William Mulholland finished building the Los Angeles Aqueduct – a 233-mile engineering masterwork transporting water from the Owens Valley, across the desert, to a barren corner of California that would become the home of filmmaking.
‘The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. I know as well as the next person that there is considerable transcendent value in a river running wild and undimmed, a river running free over granite, but I have also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was running dry.’
—Joan Didion, ‘Holy Water’
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