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Piscina Mirabilis

Overview

The building overlooking the harbour of Misenum, built in the Augustan period to ensure the water supply for the military base and the city as a whole, was named Piscina mirabilis by the seventeenth-eighteenth-century antiquarian. The structure, also designed by Giuliano Sangallo because of his regal architecture, is a vast cistern with a capacity of 12,600 cubic metres. Excavated out of the tufa rock, it has a quadrangular plan and is divided internally into five long naves and thirteen smaller ones by four rows of twelve cruciform pillars supporting a barrel vault, above which rises a roof terrace covered in cocciopesto, connected to the interior by a series of doors. The outer walls are made of opus reticulatum, while the side walls are covered with brick, the pillars are made of tufa. On the inside, a 1.10 m deep basin was excavated, with an outlet at one end, which served as a decanting and draining basin to keep the cistern clean, fed by an inlet duct located near the western entrance. The windows also allowed for a fair amount of light and adequate ventilation. On the exterior, on the north-east side, twelve small rooms were also built, covered by barrel vaults, with a floor 1.80 metres lower than the vault of the cistern, and in opus mixtum and listatum, with a cocciopesto kerb at the bottom of the pillars. These spaces would have been an extension to the hydraulic system, built in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD.

Hours

Sunday
09:30 am-04:00 pm
Monday - Thursday
Closed
Friday - Saturday
09:30 am-04:00 pm
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Piscina Mirabilis
Via Piscina Mirabile, 27, 80070 Bacoli NA, Italia
Call +390813355165 Website

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