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St Patrick’s Well, Orvieto

Posted on 11 April 2013 by patnicholas in ETRUSCAN PLACES 1 Comment
St Patrick's Well Orvieto

St Patrick’s well is one of the sights of Orvieto. And one of the places we always visit. It’s dark so a tripod is handy.

The life of an Italian prince in Renaissance Italy was pretty dangerous and no less so for the clerical prince known as the pope. In 1527 after Rome had been sacked by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s troops, slaying between 6 and 12 thousand, Pope Clement looked to nearby Orvieto on the top of a cliff as a safe refuge. To this end he needed a well to be dug in the fortress, but the water table was a long way down.

St Patricks well

the view from PARADISE

The brilliant Florentine architect Antonio San Gallo realised a brilliant solution to reach down the 53m (174ft) to the water. He constructed a double helix so the donkey descending never met the one ascending.

St Patricks well

in the water a small fortune in coins plus sun-glasses, iphones and even half dead lizards

A Canadian scientist told me that Francis Crick had visited Orvieto in the 40s – could the revelation of the structure of DNA have had anything to do with the visit?
The well is known familiarly as St Patrick’s as Italians refer to a spendthrift as having pockets as deep as St Patrick’s well. There are 70 windows spiralling right down to the bottom and 248 steps. The stygian gloom and the spiralling steps are so evocative that I used a photo of the well as the background for my image of Danae though she was actually imprisoned in a tower.

St Patricks well

The view from INFERNO ” I never saw a man who looked. With such a wistful eye. Upon that little tent of blue. Which prisoners call the sky” Oscar Wilde

 

 

 

 

Related posts:

Orvieto Umbria April DawnOrvieto, Umbrian Jewel Vulci stalactite cliff and waterfallOrvieto on Film flooded OrvietoFlooded Orvieto corpus_domini_orvieto.PatrickNicholasPhotoworkshop in Orvieto: Corpus Domini Festival.

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Orvieto, sangallo, St Patrick well

One comment on “St Patrick’s Well, Orvieto”

  1. ian says:
    6 April 2014 at 12:41

    Thank you for creating this beautiful and informative webpage.

    Reply

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