pistons, which all worked at the same time when operated. Water was then "climbing", being poured from one vessel into another. Being made of wood, it got rotten and completely disappeared in time, but sometimes it is mentioned as the beginning of the "industrial period" in Belgrade. The copy of the schematics is still being kept in the library of the Matica Srpska in Novi Sad. Neumann also constructed a double spiral staircase which descends down the shaft and based it on the staircase in the Saint Peter Well in Orvieto, Italy. The diameter of the shaft is . The staircase has 212 steps and there is a small corridor at the bottom which connects two sections of the staircase, but it is usually flooded. On Austrian maps, it is named the Great Well, but when Serbian rebels liberated Belgrade from the Ottomans in the early 19th century they gradually named it the Roman Well as the common belief at the time was that all old buildings were Roman. In 1940 the Yugoslav Royal Army emptied the well, measured it and cleaned it. Because of that, during the World War II an urban myth spread through Belgrade claiming that the gold from the National bank of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was hidden in the well. German occupation forces sent three divers to check the bottom of the well, but all three disappeared. Some of the Yugoslav soldiers apparently carved a number "1940" near the bottom of the well. In 1954 a man threw his mistress into the well. Police wanted to prove that he killed her so the divers were dispatched to find the body, but they failed. Still, her body resurfaced ten days later. This story served as an inspiration for Dušan Makavejev when he wrote and directed the movie Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator in 1967. In 1964 Alfred Hitchcock visited the well and praised the "ambience". In 1967–1968, new exploration of the object was conducted. The divers discovered that the bottom is full of sludge and retrieved a number of skeletons, several animal ones and two human. In 1987 the divers explored whether there is a connection between the well and the Sava, but found no tunnel. The bottom was flat, there was one park bench in the water and a huge number of coins. The Roman Well served as an inspiration