Micaela Viglino

Politecnico di Torino, formerly full professor of Architecture History, micaela.viglino@polito.it,
CeSRAMP (Centro Studi e Ricerche Architettura Militare Piemonte), Torino, President, cesramp@gmail.com

Territori-città-fortezze sulle coste del Mediterraneo nelle raccolte sabaude di età moderna

Returned from San Quintino victory (1557), Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia got back his duchy and decided to move the capital in the cisalpine lands, in that Piemonte (Piedmont) downgraded to battlefield for many years, contended between the armies of France and Spain. Since that moment he decided to rearm the state “alla moderna”, following the most recent international experiences. So he surrounded himself of Italian famous military engineers as Ascanio Vitozzi and Ferrante Vitelli, and firearms and gunpowder experts, creating one of the most updated technical groups in defence and offence systems, to which he participated himself.
Since then, he began the extensive collection (then continued by his son Carlo Emanuele) of documents that, thanks to the universality of geographic interests, allowed to know territories and fortified structured of the known world of that time. Topographic maps, surveys and projects of cities, citadels and fortifications facing the sea have pride of the place in the ducal collection, going from the Italian-French coasts to the North African ones, from the Greek coasts to the Spanish-Portuguese ones, or coasts of the Northern Seas. All these documents, dated from the half of 16th century to the beginning of the next one, are contained in five precious volumes (bound in the first decades of 17 th century) that, with more than 700 maps, constitute the series Architettura Militare conserved in the Archivio di Stato di Torino.
Basing mostly on this rich documentary source, my essay would examine, for samples, some drawings series that provide useful information and research sparks about territories, cities and fortifications arrangement during the 16th-17 th century along the Mediterranean coasts.

Marino Viganò

Istituto Italiano dei Castelli, Milano, Italy, marino.vi61@gmail.com

Dalle Alpi al Mediterraneo: Giovan Giacomo Paleari Fratino e Pietro Morettini, ingegneri militari «svizzeri» in Corsica (1563, 1720)

Assigned in 1447 to the sovereignty of the republic of Genoa by pope Niccolò V, the isle of Corsica is hold by the shareholders of the Banco di San Giorgio from 1453, and enters the Mediterranean system of connection and defense of imperial Spain after 1528. Opposing this system, Francis I, king of France, Suleiman, chief of the Ottoman empire, Sampiero della Bastelica, corsican nobleman, take the island in 1553-1559. Fearing then another occupation, the Banco returns Corsica in 1562 to the republic, which applies to Philipp II of Spain, and obtains his «swiss» engineer Giovan Giacomo Paleari Fratino: thanks to his inspection, an outstanding plan of fortification is developed in 1563-1565, preventing Sampiero to besiege the main places of Bonifacio, Bastia, Ajaccio, San Fiorenzo, Calvi. When, some 150 years after, Corsica turns again in a period of ottoman threat and internal uprisings, Genoa charges another «swiss» military expert, its first engineer Pietro Morettini, in 1720, to draw fortifications for Ajaccio, Bonifacio, Calvi, implementing those old-fashioned strongholds. So, from the Alps to the Mediterranean, «swiss» subjects become involved in the corsican affairs.