Pozzo di S. Patrizio

St Patrick's Well in Orvieto is a shaft cut 54 metres down into the volcanic rock beneath an Umbrian hill town, and what makes it extraordinary is the way down. Two spiral ramps wind around the central cylinder, one inside the other like a double helix, each entered by its own door, so that mules carrying empty vessels could go down one ramp and come back up laden with water on the other without ever meeting. Some 248 steps and about seventy windows opening onto the shaft let daylight fall all the way to the bottom, where a footbridge connects the two ramps above the water.

The well was born of a crisis. In 1527 the troops of Emperor Charles V sacked Rome and Pope Clement VII fled to Orvieto, a natural fortress perched on a flat-topped butte of tuff above sheer cliffs. The town was easy to defend but short of water in case of siege, so the pope commissioned the Florentine architect and engineer Antonio da Sangallo the Younger to reach the springs deep under the plateau. Work began in 1527 and was completed in 1537 under Clement's successor Paul III Farnese, whose lilies decorate the low cylindrical drum above ground. Giovanni Battista da Cortona supervised the site in Sangallo's absence, and the decorative work is by Simone Mosca. Over the entrance a Latin inscription states that what nature had denied to the fortifications, human industry supplied.

At first it was simply the well of the Rocca, serving the nearby Albornoz fortress. The present name came only in the 19th century, from the friars of the Servite convent, who were thinking of the legend of St Patrick's Purgatory: a cave on an island in Lough Derg, in Ireland, said to lead down to the afterlife. In Italian "a St Patrick's Well" has since become a byword for a bottomless supply.

Orvieto itself rises dramatically on its rock between Rome and Florence, a town with deep Etruscan roots whose defensive walls continue the line of the cliffs.

Getting there

The well is in Orvieto, at the edge of the historic centre. A funicular climbs 157 metres from Orvieto railway station, on the Florence–Rome line, through the ramparts to Piazza Cahen in the old town. Todi, the nearest larger town, is about 25 km away; the nearest airport is Perugia San Francesco d'Assisi – Umbria International Airport (PEG), about 52 km away.