My thought was, how incredible.

When I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, our home had a cistern. In the basement.  Yes, we collected rainwater. From the roof. We often drank the water.  Cisterns used to be a way of life.  And no more so than in Matera, in the south of Italy. I was there last week. And ventured into the world’s second largest cistern. A mammoth thing. Empty. No longer used.  The walls of the cistern, carved out of natural rock, must be over 100 feet  high. And it was filled with water. In the 1700s. It was the primary source of water for the inhabitants of Matera, a city with an ancient history. It’s believed that humans  were living and thriving in Matera 15,000 years ago, in Paleolithic times. Even before the Iron and Bronze Ages.   Descendants from those eras are believed to still be living in Matera. Because the place was never abandoned. Human life always found a way to survive in Matera. In large part, by collecting rainwater. In many, many relatively small cisterns. Some of which fed the big cistern.  The cistern is a tourist attraction. I walked down into it on a metal gangway. And my thought was, how incredible.  A wonder.  There’s only one bigger system in the world. In Istanbul. In Turkey.  I suspect that the cistern in my hometown might have qualified as the world’s smallest cistern. –Jim Broede