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An Italian town hides a 2,000-year-old engineering marvel.
Descend a flight of ancient stone steps to find yourself face-to-face with a 2,000-year-old engineering marvel: a remarkably well-preserved Roman cistern. Its scale and scientific ingenuity showcase the remarkable know-how of the Roman city founders who built this hilltop city fortress over 2,000 years ago. Emperor Augustus commissioned this massively ambitious project in the first century. He intended the water system to provide drinking water for the Roman colony of Firmum Picenum (now Fermo) on Italy’s Adriatic coast. The water was collected from natural springs and rain, and deep under the city’s tufa rock, the engineers built a complex arrangement of graded cisterns and aeration to purify and store the precious resource. Some historians believe the system was also used to provision Roman expeditionary ships in the nearby harbor of Porto San Giorgio.
