Sewer Rats

There is an annual event in Italy where monuments or other cool things that are normally closed to the public are open for one weekend. And this is the weekend!

Here in Todi, we had three things open: the basement floors of Santa Maria in Camuccia (the cool, multi-level church that we've written about before), the monastery at the now-agricultural school's campus, and the 19th-century drains that were installed as a landslide prevention tactic. Obviously, drain crawling was a good idea, so Leonardo helped us by calling the coordinator to reserve our spots.

They weren't able to accommodate all of us, so the boys and I went for the earlier time slot. Michael will be going later with the girls and the French students (I don't think I've mentioned here that we have 3 boys from France for the week).

We got there (late, unfortunately...it's a good bit further down than I'd realized...so we missed the first part of the explanation). After having been given hardhats with caving lights, we descended about 3 meters by metal latter via a small concrete aperture in the ground.

We found ourselves in a low arched tunnel that had a small channel at waist height (in other locations, the channels were on either side of the walkway at foot level). While nearly the entire corridor was bricked up, the walls had periodic channels (weepholes) through them to allow the water to drain from the soil into the culvert. Since the water here is so hard, a number of them were glossy with calcareous deposits running down ... a type of stalactite formation, if you will. There were also bricks emerging from the wall surface. These were structures that were used to hold the wood forms during construction of the arched ceiling!

Some areas even had little stalactites coming through the arched roof. After 200 years, they are nearly 2 inches long and about a quarter of an inch in diameter.

Around corners, up steps, looking up through wells, ducking here and there...after an hour, we re-emerged into the sunlight feeling damp, dirty, and ready for gelato.

Love,

Alexandra