Story

The commission belongs to the long mandate of Carlo Savonuzzi as municipal engineer, a post he took on in 1926 and held, with a wartime hiatus, until 1962. Ferrara entered the 1930s with an inadequate water network and a planning ambition to monumentalise the southern edge of the historic city. Savonuzzi answered both problems at once. He sited the reservoir at the head of Piazza XXIV Maggio, on a triangular plot opened by the demolition of the old Cittadella ramparts, so the tower could close the new perspective from Viale Cavour and Corso Isonzo. The structure was inaugurated in 1932, the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, and presented as a civic gift rather than a Fascist monument—an ambiguity Savonuzzi cultivated throughout his career.

The architectural language is rationalist in everything that matters structurally and disciplined in what shows. Twelve reinforced-concrete columns, twelve metres tall, carry the elevated tank in a dodecagonal ring; above, a stepped concrete dome compresses the silhouette into the recognisable profile of a Renaissance tempietto. Savonuzzi keeps the surfaces flat and the openings rhythmic, refuses cornice mouldings, and lets the brick and intonaco do their work without classical orders. The fountain at the base, sculpted by Arrigo Minerbi as «Il Po e i suoi affluenti», anchors the tower with a recumbent allegory of the river and its tributaries, also in reinforced concrete. The neo-Renaissance reference is deliberate: Savonuzzi argued that the Po Valley city should not import Milanese-Como abstraction wholesale, but renegotiate rationalism through local memory of brick and proportion.

The aqueduct served as the city’s working reservoir for decades and survived the heavy Allied bombing that wrecked much of southern Ferrara in 1944. Decommissioned from the water network in the late twentieth century, the volume at the base was rehabilitated in the 2000s and now hosts «Isola del Tesoro», a municipal cultural centre for children and families. The piazza around it functions as the city’s open-air stage for civic events.

Savonuzzi’s other Ferrara works—the Liceo Ariosto, the Conservatorio Frescobaldi, the Mercato del Pesce, the Stadio Paolo Mazza, the Foro Boario—form a quietly coherent corpus of interwar civic architecture. The aqueduct remains its most legible signal: a piece of working infrastructure that the city has kept reading, ninety years on, as a monument.