Last Minute The hypogeal Amelia

The hypogeal Amelia

The excavation of tunnel and burrows dated around the epoch of the Roman "Ameria", were built in the III century B.C., and used for the most different purposes, as to estrange from the city boundaries in case of necessity, as feed storage, or to realise effective systems of sewers and for the water passage destined to the most different uses. The sewers system was a very particularly functional system of burrows, in order to maintain clean the cisterns of accumulation of the rain water, specifically those situated under Piazza Matteotti, known as Roman Cisterns, able to collect more than 4000 cubic meters of water. This wonder of the human talent is today accessible to the visitors, who will have the opportunity to explore it inside a huge gear, able to guarantee the survival of a wide community.

Such system of burrows and caves, allowed a perpetual exchange of water, its cleaning and its slide, from the harvesting place up to the desired zone. The Cava Farrattini, for instance, with its system of tunnels, guaranteed the constant water influx toward the thermal baths set under the Palazzo Farrattini, one of the main domus of the Roman Ameria.

There is then the Cave of the Five Sources, an admirable example of hydraulic engineering of the epoch, a wide and complex long system of ducts around 120 meters, destined to the water restocking of an inhabited centre displaced out of the boundaries.