The birth of the modern city and the idea of the capital

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

are many examples, starting with the early Renaissance, of modern cities that have been completely rethought in terms of urban planning, such as Pienza68, or planned from scratch, such as Palmanova69. Among the numerous examples from the Renaissance onwards of the foundation of cities/capitals, while taking into account the example of Madrid70, in the following pages we will briefly illustrate

city around the castle are the result of that design approach. Hub B. 2009, La planimetria di Sforzinda: un’interpretazione, «Arte Lombarda», vol. 155, n. 1, pp. 81-96. 68 The ancient village of Corsignano in Tuscany was the birthplace of Pope Pius II Piccolomini. In 1459 the Pontiff called the architect Bernardo Rossellino with the intention of renovating the historic centre of the village, opening a square surrounded by the Piccolomini Palace, the cathedral and the bishop’s palace. The urbanisation work, which lasted five years, also included the construction of a new suburban district with terraced houses: the ‘12 Case Nuove’, the first case of social housing in history. In terms of urban planning, what was created was a theatrical scene for public life, with an original splayed perspective effect to compensate for the narrowness of the spaces. In order to give depth to the square, Rossellino was obliged to move the church backwards, placing the apse overhanging the ridge with an original supporting buttress. Wittkower R. 1998, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, Academy Editions Ltd., London. 69 The city of Palmanova, now in the province of Udine, was founded by the Venetians in 1493 and was designed by Giulio Savorgnan, a Venetian military engineer in 1593, and the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi who drew the urban plan, conceived as a castle city with the intention of protecting Venice from a hypothetical Ottoman invasion from the Mediterranean. In the course of little more than a century, the new idea of the city thus passed from the abstraction of the perspective drawing of the ‘ideal city’ to the solid concreteness of the defensive walls. Pollak M. 2013, The ‘Palmanova effect’ and fortified European cities in the seventeenth-century, in F.P. Fiore (ed.), L’Architettura militare di Venezia in Terraferma e in Adriatico fra XVI e XVII secolo, Olschki Editore, Modena, pp. 21-36. 70 The city of Madrid, designated as the capital of the Spanish Crown by Philip II in 1561, actually stands on the site of a settlement that had existed since prehistoric times. Under the emir Mohamed I of Cordoba (852-886) Madrid - or Mayrit - began as a ribat, a religious and military enclave within which small groups of Muslims prepared for jihad, the holy war against the Christians of Spain. From the 12th century, under