Acquedotto Monumentale

Utility raised to architecture: on Piazza XXIV Maggio, engineer Carlo Savonuzzi's water tower of 1930-1932 lifts a 2,500-cubic-metre tank thirty-seven metres above the street on twelve tall arches of reinforced concrete. A fountain by Arrigo Minerbi portrays the Po and its tributaries at the foot of this calm, classical piece of municipal engineering.

Why it matters

Ferrara's early twentieth-century expansion produced a small set of civic buildings by the municipal engineer Carlo Savonuzzi, and the water tower is their most unexpected member. Built between 1930 and 1932, it solved a plain problem — storing drinking water for a growing city — with a temple-like composition of twelve arches, each twelve metres high, that the municipal tourism portal compares to the temple in Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin.

What to notice

• The twelve-arch base is built almost entirely of reinforced concrete, with proportions that evoke classical architecture.
• The tower rises thirty-seven metres, and its tank holds 2,500 cubic metres; the tourism portal describes it as Italy's largest reservoir in the 1930s.
• A fountain between the two staircases, sculpted by Arrigo Minerbi in the 1930s, represents the Po and its tributaries.
• The grove of poplars around the square, planted as a reference to the Heliades, sisters of Phaeton of Greek myth, whose story the city tied to the Po.

Context and history

The tower belongs to the Addizione Novecentista, the wave of rationalist-era public works with which Ferrara modernised beyond its Renaissance walls in the 1930s; the municipal itinerary of twentieth-century Ferrara lists it as a milestone of the rationalist style. Engineer Carlo Savonuzzi drew the project, giving a functional reservoir the poise of a monument, and Minerbi's fountain bound the structure to the river that defines the Po valley plain. It remains a landmark at the edge of the twentieth-century quarter, reflecting the city's modern engineering history.