Cerrato Cellars

Description

The ancient remains consist of two perpendicular rooms (A and B), partially cut into the rock and partly built with “laterzio” brick walls, belonging to the Roman period. The rooms are entirely covered in opus signinum and have barrel vaults. Underground ducts, connecting to wells and other tanks, flow into it. Room B is longitudinally separated into two other rooms by pillars with "laterizio" brick arches.

These were probably cisterns, connected with the city's water supply, perhaps settling basins on arrival of the aqueduct.

The two main rooms are connected with other ancient structures along the axis represented today by Guido Paglia square, Duomo square and Marino Boffa square (where the city forum was supposed to exist), all oriented according to the probable orthogonal arrangement of the urban area.

The room A, smaller (16.50 m x 4.40 m, with a height of at least 4 m), is oriented in a north-south direction and narrows in the southern part, where the wall is rounded.

The walls of the north and west sides are "laterizio" brick: the north wall has a thickness of 70/90 cm and retains an opening of 2 m wide, probably from a late period, while the west wall, which divides it from the room B, it is about 1 m thick; the other two sides are dug in the local sandstone. The walls are waterproofed with a smoothed opus signinum coating.

The barrel vault, covered with pozzolanic plaster, has numerous vent pipes and two wells, one at the southern end, 90 cm in diameter, and the other towards the north, 1 m in diameter. Both wells are contemporaneous with the cistern, as shown by the covering of their opening. In the north-west corner there is also a terracotta pipe of 24 cm in diameter.

A conduit also appears towards the south end of the eastern wall, which seems to date back. In this conduit three branches converge, all cut into the rock:

the first, 53 cm wide and about 150 cm high, almost parallel to the west wall, flows into room B;

the second, 45 cm wide, extends straight to the west at a level of about 60 cm and underneath other tunnels;

the third, 45 cm wide and about 155 cm high, reaches after a distance of about 4 meters an ancient well of 150 cm of diameter, completely plastered. …