The smaller Cisternino di Pian di Rota, in the Pian di Rota area of the city, was begun in 1845, although it had been planned as early as 1827. While, like the architect's other works, it is strictly speaking in the neoclassical style, the Cisternino di Pian di Rota also has the air of a Palladian villa of the Veneto. The symmetrical facade is dominated by a massive prostyle portico clearly based on that of the Pantheon in Rome while the composition of the facade could be emulating Scamozzi's Villa Rocca Pisani or Palladio's Villa Badoer. Whatever the inspiration, the architect's vision of achieving Utopian ideals in architecture by emulating the temples of antiquity is very evident. Such philosophies had been advocated and popularised in the paintings of the idealised Italian landscape by Claude, Poussin and Dughet. A temple similar to the Cisternino di Pian di Rota had been built in the 1750s as a garden folly in the gardens at Stourhead in England.
The interior houses the large rectangular reservoir, originally divided into two, as with the other cisternoni. One half houses a filtration system of beds of gravel and carbon. The roof of the reservoir is supported by 28 Tuscan columns.
Read more about this topic: Cisternoni Of Livorno