Cisternoni of Livorno

The Cisternoni of Livorno are a series of three large buildings in the neoclassical style at Livorno, in Tuscany, Italy. They were constructed between 1829 and 1848 as part of a complex of purification plants and storage tanks to the Leopoldino aqueduct; a fourth cisternone planned at Castellaccia was never built. The cisternoni, literally "great cisterns", provided Livorno — a city that is still today one of the principal ports of the Mediterranean — with fresh and, more importantly, clean water throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Designed by the architect Pasquale Poccianti, the cisternoni are architecturally important, as they represent the advent of an aesthetically considered approach to the design of utilitarian public work. This movement, whose followers are sometimes known as "Utopians", was pioneered by such architects as Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux at the close of the 18th century.^[1] The movement resulted in great palaces and temples of industry and commerce, their palatial and temple-like facades concealing the mundane reality of their true use, which were to dominate many towns and landscapes from the 19th century onwards.