The old Histonium, today called Vasto, twenty centuries ago was a village very flourishing as to population, trades and urban settlements so that it was given it the title of Roman Municipality. Inside the walls it had temples, fori, the capitol, thermae and circus and had also plenty of water. There was the very old aqueduct called of the Luci feed by springs placed at a very short distance from the village and built by the Pelagi, preellenic people settled in the territory since the invasion of Greek people and after by other Italic people. The water of the Luci arrived to the village by pipings built by square bricks having the seal by the trustee Quinto Osidio and therefore certanly belonging to a Roman age. The water resources of Istonium were really considerable and beside to satisfy the needs of the village could feed mills and also to fill the base of the circus under the current Piazza Rossetti, that reproduce the shape, to let naval battles called "Naumachie" disputed. The water was kept in huge cisterns called Cisterne built in the higher part of the village dating back surely to the age of the Emperor Augusto (Rome 63 b.C - Nola 14 a.C) and are one of "the most important monuments of the village". The historians of Vasto state in XVI century the Cisterne had twelve salons, nine contiguous oriented from north to south and three transversal and they had the capacity of about 8000 cube metres. Above there was a square called Piano delle Cisterne where were got some arch-shaped holes from which citizens can draw water. On the old topographical map the location of the Cisterne is well delimited by the Vicolo dei Moschetti (from the name of homonymous family living in that zone), by two keeps belonging to the defensive town-walls called Torre Mezza or of the Moschetti and Torre Bacchetta, now destroyed, and by the back street of the Convento of the Clarisse and of the Church of Santa Chiara, destroyed too. The Cisterne were built by bricks and mortar very hard and the walls, one metrer thick, were covered with water-proof plastering like the floor. They were subdivided by arch-shaped walls and closed by sail-vaults. In the Middle Ages the water of the Cisterne of Vasto, besides to feed troughs for animals and drawbridges, also fed a fountain placed at Porta Palazzo built about 1465 by the Mastrogiurato Cola Sottile. The use of the water of the fountain was controlled by the provision of the Statuti Municipali in which is written: "it is specially forbidden to draw water by the Luci placed along the piping in the private estates: this water is destined to be drunk , it is not allowed to wash linen". During the centuries the Cisterne were used as foundations of urban buildings, lumber-room, cellars, and also dwellings and artisan shops and have undergone lot of transformations and manumissions. The first rational surveys were done in a modern age by the Vastese architect Gioacchino Vassetta and completed by Pietro Romani. Currently a little part of the Cisterne has been refurbished protecting carefully the integrity of the old elements of the building, to be turned into a very modern bar-restaurant in which, especially the tourists, admiring the enchanting landscape of the Vastese coast, can rediscover a strip of the history of the city that gives hospitality to them.