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driven into the river bed. The bridge, characterised by its own sacred nature, must have been built without brass or iron, held together only by its beams, according to a technology that must have allowed it to be easily dismantled in case of need. Julius Caesar described the same technology centuries later in De Bello Gallico, referring to the military bridge he had built over the Rhine: the method of construction typology must have been part of the consolidated heritage of Roman military engineers66. The birth of the modern city and the idea of the capital There are many examples throughout history of cities founded entirely with the intention of creating ideal settlements to satisfy new political and social needs. Although Leonardo’s dream of rethinking the city of Milan as Sforzinda67 never really came to fruition, there 66 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his text dedicated to Roman antiquities, stresses the sacredness of the bridge for the Romans, to which a priestly order dedicated to its custody was attached: the Pontefices, a Latin term indicating ‘bridge-builders’. Ibidem, pp.176-177. 67 In the Libro Architettonico, consisting of XXIV volumes written between 1458 and 1464, the architect and sculptor Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete (1400 - 1469), outlines the project of the ideal city he theorised in full: Sforzinda, one of the first examples of urban planning with a complex geometric design, was conceived within a wall shaped like an eight-pointed star. The theme of the ideal city also fascinated Leonardo da Vinci, who began working on it in Milan in the late 1480s. Unlike the treatise writers of his time, Leonardo’s focus was not on the organisation of geometric space but rather on functional space, which envisaged a more open urban fabric characterised by wide, straight streets and a capillary presence of waterways, separating the circulation of people and goods on several levels. The originality of the project combined two important and inseparable aspects: the fusion of architecture, mechanics and hydraulics with the broader idea of urban beauty reflected in the elegance of the architecture, the porticoed streets, the palaces adorned with attics and terraces. Milan’s network of canals and the radiocentric structure of the
