In the central area of the island of Ventotene is a Roman cistern that is the heart of the water system assuring a steady supply to the residential areas.
The system comprises two huge tanks able to directly collect the rainwater and to then filter the water thanks to their particular structure.
The Cistern of Villa Stefania covers about 700 sqmand that of Detenuti over 1200 square meters. Both are still intact thanks to their earthenware linings.
The Roman cisterns: from aqueduct to prison
On an island without natural springs, the problem of water supply is fundamental for life.
Roman engineers designed and built a marvelous work with large gravity basins that collected rainwater, convey it to a settling tank to retain the debris and then stored it in a series of large underground cisterns dug into the tuff.
A series of pipelines then distributed the water from the tanks to the whole island with a perfect balance of well calculated slopes in which the water did not stagnate and did not run too fast.
The Romans managed to guarantee the conservation and potability of the water in the cisterns thanks to the impermeability of the walls covered with cocciopesto, fragments of bricks bound with mortar, and the slopes of the cistern that favored the movement and circulation of water by exploiting the different weight of water at different temperatures.
The cisterns then had a constant exchange of air and the presence of capitons which guaranteed cleanliness and continuous oxygenation.
In the 1700s, the Bourbons, for their social community project for Ponza and Ventotene, called 100 convicts to work who were housed in one of the ancient cisterns of the island which from that moment there will take the name of "Cistern of the Prisoners".
Today, the work of these men who tried to make their prison a more welcoming home is still visible.
You can see landscape drawings that perhaps evoke their countries of origin, graffiti with the clear message of freedom like boats and stairways leading towards the sun.
A series of consecutive numbers in one of the outermost galleries makes the prisoners' beds suffer and in what was perhaps the infirmary.
After the construction of the Bourbon Ventotene, the convicts left the island and the cistern was abandoned, but its history still fills the spirit of the island loved by the Bourbons.
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