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Blog No 16 Pozzo di San Patrizio (St. Patrick's Well)

Hill City of Orvieto

Windows along stairway

While visiting Italy and Austria in October and November 2025, Michele and I visited the hill city of Orvieto in the province of Umbria. One of the mandatory sights is to visit St Patrick's Well and it's useful to know a bit of Renaissance history to appreciate why the well was constructed. The Holy Roman Empire was a secular union of a number of Central European states that was closely intertwined with the Roman Catholic Church. As Voltaire famously said the entity was “neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire.” Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire at the time, had under him a collection of mutinous troops consisting of Germans, Spaniards and Italians, who without a direct order from Charles V, began a brutal attack on Rome, killing thousands of people, and leaving others to die of starvation and the plague, and is known as the Sack of Rome of 1517. Pope Clement VII was taken as a prisoner to Castel Sant’Angelo, and after 6 months he escaped to Orvieto, disguised as a peddler. Taking refuge in the medieval hill city of Orvieto was a papal tradition, having been done five times. Charles V was staunchly Catholic, and exactly what led to mutinous troops brutal attack on Rome is still a mystery to me, although I learned that the Sack of Rome of 1517 is a prime example of internecine warfare.

Pope Clement VII commissioned the architect and engineer Antonio Da Sangallo the Younger to dig a well as a source of water should it be needed on top this fortressed hill town of Orvieto where he had sought refuge. Near the edge of the cliffs on one end of the city, a cylindrical cavity was painstakingly carved out of the rock, 43 ft diameter and 175 -200 ft deep. Da Sangallo designed a double helix stairway so that pedestrians and mules could descend into the well down to the bottom and climb up out of the well without ever encountering traffic on the other helix. There were a total of 70 rectangular openings along the course of the stairway that illuminated the well all the way to the bottom with natural light. The well was completed under Pope Paul III, but from what I could gather the well was never needed as a source of water.

We stood at the edge of the cliffs and enjoyed a splendid view of the valley below us. In the distance passenger trains streamed by on a serious of tracks, some stopping at the station, others whizzing by. We found the ticket booth and entered the well, beginning our descent walking clockwise. The walkway was steeply slanted interspersed with 248 steps before you reach the bottom. The pattern of a slanted walkway with steps was not a pattern easy to accommodate to, and seemed awkward throughout. I took my time and completed the journey down to bottom and back up to the top.

The climb down the well was not overly difficulty or frightening, and seemed pretty benign when I compared it to climbing the medieval tower (Torre del Mangia) at the clam-shaped central square of Siena the year before.