Under the main square of Matera, where people drink their coffee and teenagers arrange to meet, there is a cavity fifteen metres deep that held five million litres of water.
The extraordinary part is not that it exists: it is that until 1991 nobody knew. The Palombaro Lungo was found during the works to redevelop Piazza Vittorio Veneto: on a road site, in the middle of town, in a city that had been walking over it for seventy years.
The visit takes a quarter of an hour and costs three euros, and it is probably the best ratio in Matera between time spent and things understood.
How you build a city where there is no water
Why does a city build itself a water reserve under its main square instead of growing beside a river? Because here the river is no use.
Matera sits on a plateau of calcarenite, a karst rock: rainwater does not stand on the surface, it filters down and disappears. The Gravina stream runs at the bottom of the canyon, a hundred metres below the city, and hauling it up in buckets is not a water system.
The solution was the same one that produced the Sassi: carving. Calcarenite can be cut with simple tools and, once exposed to the air, it hardens; and if it is then lined with cocciopesto, mortar mixed with crushed brick, it holds water. Every house had its own cistern under the floor, fed by channels that collected rain from the roofs and the slopes. The city did not go looking for water: it kept the water it got.
What you see on the way down
You go in through a door set flush with the square, down a staircase, and within a few steps you pass from the noise of the centre to the silence of a cave.
The cistern is fifteen metres deep, with vaults reaching eighteen and a width of fifty, and holds about five million litres. It is not a well but a long, articulated space, with partitions of rock left standing to act as pillars and diaphragms: you cross it on suspended metal walkways, with the remaining water below your feet.
What does it feel like? It feels like a church, which is why the people of Matera call it the cathedral of water. The proportion between height and width, the curved walls marked by pick strokes and the light falling from above produce a space the brain reads as sacred architecture, even while knowing perfectly well that it was there for drinking.
The marks on the walls are the part to look at closely. The darker horizontal bands are the water levels in different periods, and the irregular niches are the points where the cistern was enlarged by swallowing earlier cavities.
A building site six hundred years long
The Palombaro Lungo was not built: it grew, by successive additions.
The first basins in this area date from the thirteenth century. The main body was cut in the sixteenth, when the square above became the centre of the new city outside the Sassi. The enlargement that gave it its present shape was completed in 1882, to a design by the engineer Rosi.
Then, in 1927, the Apulian aqueduct arrived and the cistern stopped being useful. It was closed, forgotten and rediscovered seventy years later, when the square was rebuilt. It is a curve that fits almost everything beneath Matera.
It is not the only one, and that is the point
The Palombaro Lungo is the largest, but a single tank would never have watered a city.
Beneath the two districts runs a network of smaller cisterns, channels and wells that collected the surplus water and moved it from one level to another. To that must be added the neviere, cavities where snow was pressed in winter to have ice in summer, and the well houses, where the family cistern is the very space around which the house is organised.
Piazza Vittorio Veneto shows it on the surface too: part of the street level is open, and you can see the hypogea with the remains of carved rooms and the arches of an old religious complex. You are walking above an underground city as deep as the one above.
When you go back to the viewpoints and look at the Sassi, try counting them this way: every house you can see has a cistern beneath it, and what looks like a panorama of dwellings is in fact a water system on an urban scale, built without pumps and without a river.
Practical information
Details checked on 6 September 2026 by cross-referencing the records of isassidimatera.com and visitarematera.com, because the Palombaro Lungo has no official site publishing hours and prices. They are two independent sources and they agree, but the figure does not come from the operator: check on the spot.
Tickets. The ticket costs 3 euros. Under-18s go free. For school parties of more than 15 the rate drops to 1.50 euros per person.
Hours. The cistern opens every day 10.00-13.00 and 15.00-18.00. In winter the opening shortens, except on public holidays.
Booking. There is none, either for individuals or for groups. The ticket is bought on site, at the desk in the hypogea of Piazza Vittorio Veneto.
How long it takes. You stay inside the cistern for a maximum of fifteen minutes, because entries are staggered. Between buying the ticket, waiting and visiting, allow three quarters of an hour.
Getting there. You enter directly from Piazza Vittorio Veneto, in the middle of town, ten minutes on foot from the Ferrovie Appulo Lucane station.
Careful: it is not wheelchair accessible. You go down a staircase and walk on suspended metal walkways, with handrails but no ramps. Inside it is cool all year and the humidity is high.
Why do this one first
If you have just arrived in Matera and do not know where to start, start here, and not for convenience.
The Sassi are understood backwards, from below: the water first, then the houses. A quarter of an hour inside the Palombaro Lungo explains why a city settled on rock with no springs and how it managed to stay there for millennia, and from that moment the fronts up above stop being a view and become the upper floor of something.
The natural sequel is the article on the Sassi and the cave house, which goes inside the dwellings these cisterns served. The whole picture of the city is in my guide on what to see in Matera, and above the square, at the top of the climb, stands the cathedral.
Photographs: the interiors of the Palombaro Lungo by Holger Uwe Schmitt (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Piazza Vittorio Veneto by Bernard Gagnon (CC BY 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
