Roman cistern
Following the provincial road that leads from Montaione to Gambassi for about a kilometre, you come across a Roman cistern dating back to the 3rd century AD.
Discovered in the 1960s in the locality of Sant'Antonio, the excavation area was called "Il Muraccio" precisely because of the characteristic of the cistern whose walls have been visible since ancient times.
The structure 32.5 meters long and 4.50 meters wide, partially underground, consists of three separate and communicating tanks, with a slight difference in height and connected by transversal walls with an opening in the center to allow the passage of water.
By analogy with other cisterns of the same period that have come down to us and found in other parts of Tuscany in better condition, we can hypothesize that it is a cistern covered with barrel vaults.
Note the construction technique of this masonry device in "opus caementicum" formed by a dry wall made with a mixture of hydraulic lime mortar combined with small and medium-sized limestone together with brick fragments.
The cement work was covered with a brick facing occasionally interspersed with rows of fairly squared stones whose remains are still visible at the foot of the wall. The terminal part has a different size of limestone, larger than that of the central nucleus. The internal part has large traces of the original plaster; the remaining above-ground part was mainly destroyed.
The cistern that was to collect the water from Poggio all'Aglione had a capacity of around 200,000 liters and was to serve as a water reserve for a town or villa in the immediate vicinity, the exact location of which is not easy to establish, even though traces of mosaics found near the site confirm its existence.
In 1998 further excavations brought to light a series of terracotta pipelines typical of the Greek and Roman era which, housed in a layer of mortar and stones, must have served to feed some brick kilns located in the locality of "Pozzolo" where the remains of ancient bricks.
Translated by Google •
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