World According to Pete

Wacky random ramblings about wacky random trips


Roman Cisterns

(Even more notes from March 2025)

And then it was time to finally check out the Roman Cisterns! Todi is a hilltop town, so the Romans couldn’t exactly run aqueducts up to it; instead they built huge cisterns in which to store rainwater. The main piazza is built on top of these, and the locals apparently didn’t even realize it until like 1880 or so when someone starting digging! I read there are 5 kilometers of tunnels running all around beneath the city, I was really stoked to explore all of this!! Spoiler alert: we didn’t 😂

But first I’m gonna blast through a few more restaurant pix 😀

I still love this old fountain
Back at our flat, I managed to break my headphones somehow 🙁
Dinner back at Cavour’s, aka The Warm Pizza Restaurant
Dessert back at Restaurante Umbria
All week we’ve been trying to figure out when we can check out the underground Roman cisterns
And we finally figured it out! The hipster dude is from the Tourist Office, his job is to take our money, open the door for us, then leave as quickly as possible
The Romans built all of this (minus the lights) at least 2000 years ago
People were a lot shorter then 😂
Everything topside is still supported by all these ancient structures–roads, buildings, everything
It appears to be endless, but sadly the public portion isn’t… we got to see maybe two-hundred feet of it lol so much for endless kilometers!! It was still worth seeing tho, how often to you get to go underground actual Roman buildings???
HAH!!!! OMG I almost forgot: there was a completely ludicrous “modern art installation” down there: a couple of video screens depicting water doing various things, and hilariously speakers were playing recordings of dripping water, I guess the thought was to make visitors feel like they were mice trapped down in a urinal??
Still tho, there is legit ancient Roman history down here, despite the modern attempts of “art” to pointlessly distract us from it
Oh no, could this be the very end of our blog?!?



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