It is the largest cistern in Matera and is located in Piazza Vittorio Veneto, the main square of the historic center. It was built by the Municipality of Matera at the end of the nineteenth century, connecting various sixteenth-century underground rooms, such as cisterns, warehouses, tanneries, which were also enlarged. About fifteen meters deep, and about fifty meters long, in the direction of the Palazzo dell’Annunziata, it appears to visitors like a true “cathedral” of underground water.
This enormous cistern could contain up to five million liters of water, in such a way as to be able to satisfy the water needs of the inhabitants of the Piano district. Like all cisterns, the Palombaro Lungo was also internally covered with a special triple layer of water-repellent plaster, called cocciopesto, composed of sand, lime, clay and pozzolana. A rather rounded shape was given to the corners, so that they could resist the strong push given by the pressure of the water, which could have caused the plaster to break and, therefore, the waterproofing of the cistern. The Palombaro Lungo was fed by a stream of meteoric spring water, coming from the hill of the Tramontano Castle.
On its descent, before reaching the cistern, the water fed the nearby Fontana Ferdinandea. Even today, water sometimes flows into the Palombaro Lungo, from a specific point on the bottom, and is periodically sucked up by water pumps, to allow visitors to pass on the walkways. When the cistern was completed, the Piano area was not yet as we see it today, with the “normal” built houses, but it still had many hypogea (subterranean places directly visible under the sky): as in the Sassi neighbourhoods, also in this part of the Piano there were many rooms dug directly into the rock, such as cave houses, stables, warehouses, granaries, neighborhoods (small courtyards overlooked by the entrances of several cave houses) and a cave church, that of the Santo Spirito, which can be visited today.
At the end of the works to complete the cistern, therefore, all these excavated rooms were buried, to give the square its current layout of the walking surface. This is how Piazza Vittorio Veneto was born, whose well on the surface had six mouths, to allow the people of Matera to supply water by lowering buckets. The cistern stopped working at the end of the 1920s, when the new Apulian Aqueduct “Acquedotto Pugliese” began to supply drinking water to Matera too. At this point, the Long Palombaro was somehow “forgotten” but, at the beginning of the 1990s, during the renovation works of the square, it was found together with other hypogea and some volunteer divers wanted to explore it, on board a dinghy. Inside, some lost objects were found that had accidentally fallen while drawing water, such as buckets, coins, pins and some watches.
