Pozzo della Cava — A Renaissance Well Through Older Layers
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Transcript
Pozzo della Cava is smaller and less monumental than Saint Patrick’s Well, but historically it may be even better at showing Orvieto’s habit of reuse. The shaft was enlarged in the sixteenth century, when Pope Clement VII ordered work on water supplies. Excavation exposed older Etruscan features and a sequence of underground rooms created for different purposes.
Here you can read the cliff almost like a reused notebook. One generation cuts a cistern; another expands a well; later residents add cellars, workshops or rubbish pits. The result is not a pristine archaeological layer but a stack of interventions.
That messiness is valuable. Cities rarely replace one period cleanly with another. They drill through, repair and repurpose what is already there. Pozzo della Cava makes that process unusually visible.