Analisi storico-archeologica di una cisterna post-medievale del contado fiorentino

Abstract

The paper is focused on the historical and archaeological analysis of a post-medieval cistern located in the municipality of Sesto Fiorentino, close to the city of Florence. The structure is well preserved but the intense transformations that has undergone the context in the last fifty years caused a “decontextualization” of the building within the landscape. The ancient landscape characterized by olive-groves and orchards with the sporadic presence of villas, during the last fifty years, became an industrial and residential area, with the consequent construction of numerous buildings that have profoundly transformed the landscape and the architecture. Today the few surviving ancient evidences may include some villas built during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and some artifacts of medieval period that is profoundly decontextualized. The object of study of this paper is a cistern located inside an industrial area whose first sources date back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; an interesting element that represent an evidence of constructive culture and methods of the florentine society for the exploitation of natural resources.