Citerne Romaine

The Citerne Romaine is an underground Roman cistern close to Antibes cathedral, built to supply the population and the public baths. Rainwater and water from the aqueducts pooled inside it, unseen. Antibes began as Antipolis, a trading post that settlers from Massalia, today's Marseille, founded around the third century BC.

Excavations around Place Mariéjol have traced this quarter back to its beginnings. Domestic spaces and courtyards stood here as early as the fifth and sixth centuries BC. Massaliote settlers later reorganised the area, raising new walls and laying floors of beaten earth or compacted tile. Roman builders then set new masonry walls on the foundations of older ones. One room served as a store, holding dolia, the great storage jars. A covered sewer of hard limestone slabs drained the street to the south. The cistern itself was lined with a waterproof concrete mixed from crushed tile, the Roman answer to seepage. Some ancient walls nearby doubled as retaining walls against the rocky terrain. By the fourth and fifth centuries the quarter stood empty, and layers of painted plaster, tile and mud brick gathered over it. Pottery from many periods has come out of this ground, tracing trade and daily life across the centuries.

The cistern forms one piece of a larger monumental complex from Roman times. Its substructures still show around the medieval castle and the two towers that overlook the promontory. You cannot go inside, but at night a blue light gives it a crypt-like glow, and its outline shows from above.