Mapping fortified cities in early modern Southern Italy. Digital tools to investigate architectural heritage

The project aims at examining urban fortifications of southern continental Italy during the Spanish viceroyalty, with the aim of mapping the histories and geographies connected to the urban walls and their architectural attributes. Despite the numerous studies in recent decades, to date a critical inventory of urban fortresses in that area has never been carried out, and they have not been the focus of an overall research systematizing information and tracing their history up to present. Contributions mainly focused on isolated case studies; collections of drawings and official reports are scattered in numerous archives and libraries. A substantial part of the project intends to carry out a historical survey and new historical research to document sites that are little or not known at all, in order to set up a first critical inventory. Specific research topics will be the various actors involved in the projects and their circulation on the different sites. The project will also examine in depth two sample urban walls, chosen as sufficiently documented and representative: on the one hand they will be the subject of a morphological and architectural study, on the other hand the issue of margins will be addressed. Indeed, urban walls were not a simple line but spaces with their own depth and “porosity” that changed over time, and they have fully intercepted the recent urban transformations. It will be examined if and how the margins (still existing or not) of the sample fortifications still act as memorial elements and/or as markers of borders for the city. The research will adopt an interdisciplinary approach combining the insights of disciplines specific to architecture and tools of Digital Humanities: a GIS database will collect and map textual and visual information on fortifications and it will be transferred to a freely consultable web-GIS conceived as an accessible and implementable digital tool of knowledge for a wide range of users. This can be a fruitful strategy to understand from new points of view a phenomenon extended in time and space whose effects fully concern current cities as well as a significant part of the Italian urban built heritage.