Orvieto and Saint Patrick's Well, between Popes and Etruscans

Orvieto stands on a tufa cliff rising sheer above the Paglia valley, like a ship of stone. This position made it impregnable, but also short of water in case of siege. From this problem was born, in the sixteenth century, one of the masterpieces of Renaissance engineering, Saint Patrick's Well. Around and beneath the city, however, lie far older layers, from the Etruscan necropolis to the hundreds of cavities dug into the tufa over the centuries.

A fleeing pope and a well for the siege

In 1527, after the Sack of Rome, Pope Clement VII de' Medici took refuge in Orvieto. Fearing that the city might be besieged, he ordered a well to be dug that could guarantee abundant water. The project was entrusted to the architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, and the work was completed in 1537, under the pontificate of Paul III. The well reaches a depth of over fifty metres and draws on an aquifer beneath the cliff.

Sangallo's brilliant idea was to create two independent spiral ramps that wind around the shaft without ever meeting. Each has 248 steps and takes light from 72 windows opening onto the central shaft. Donkeys loaded with containers could thus go down one ramp and come up the other without getting in each other's way. Above the entrance a Latin inscription records that human ingenuity supplied what nature had denied the fortress.

Why Saint Patrick

The well's name is not the original one and was given later. It recalls Saint Patrick's Purgatory, a cave on an island in Lough Derg in Ireland that medieval tradition regarded as an entrance to the afterlife. According to legend, Christ had shown it to the saint to convince the Irish of the existence of punishment beyond the grave, and pilgrims who went down into it believed they saw visions of the other world.

The dizzying depth of the Orvieto well suggested the comparison with that legendary abyss. The name has also given rise to an Italian saying: «to be a well of Saint Patrick» means a resource that seems inexhaustible, or a bottomless expense. In this way a piece of hydraulic engineering, built to withstand a siege, entered the everyday language of all Italians.

The city of miracles and the underground city

Orvieto is also the city of the Corporal. According to tradition, in 1263 at Bolsena a priest who doubted the real presence of Christ saw the host bleed onto the altar linen. Pope Urban IV, then residing in Orvieto, established the feast of Corpus Christi in 1264. The linen is kept in the cathedral, where Luca Signorelli painted between 1499 and 1504 the apocalyptic frescoes of the San Brizio chapel.

Beneath the cliff stretches a maze of caves, tunnels, cisterns and dovecotes dug into the tufa by the Etruscans and by the inhabitants of later centuries. At the foot of the city the Crocifisso del Tufo necropolis preserves chamber tombs lined up along real streets, with the names of the dead carved on the lintels in the Etruscan language.

Descending the steps of Saint Patrick's Well means making a small journey downwards, between light and shadow, like the pilgrims who in Ireland sought the entrance to purgatory. Orvieto shows how a practical need can become a symbol, and how a city's memory is built in layers, just like the tufa on which it is founded.