RISULTATI RICERCA

This article examines the main cartographic representations of three Sicilian towns Palermo, Messina, and Catania drafted between XVIth and XIXth century. The maps and the illustrations are not analyzed with a contemplative attitude aimed at a description/classification of the elements and features of the maps, nor as an analysis of the evolution of knowledge and techniques, but rather with the purpose of investigating the external motivations that produced and justified them. This approach better allows us to identify the cartographer’s point of view and implement the descriptions that often derive from or accompany or illustrate these representations in reconstructing their historical context. These interpretations can help us to understand the ‘complicity’ between the author and the observer that sheds light on understanding these maps. In this way maps and views, like any other document, can be viewed within an historical context and not as simple illustrations of the past.

The way in which the towns of Enna, Agrigento and Trapani were considered in modern iconography was quite different. Enna was not included in the 16th century Atlas of towns and was only of minor interest for the Grand Tour. On the contrary, Agrigento, although quite well known between the 15th and 16th centuries, due to its importance as a wheat producer, can be found in the iconographical inventories only in the late 1700’s, as European travellers had, in the meantime, extended the range of their wanderings southwards in search of antiquities. As a flourishing emporium between the Peninsula and Africa, Trapani begins to be featured in collections of portraits of towns at the end of the 1500’s. It then gained great notoriety over the following centuries, just as its political and economical role in the kingdom was becoming marginal. Only with the growing phenomenon of travel in Sicily do urban portraits finally manifest significant changes in the choice of the perspective and of the issues to be highlighted.

During the period of the Bourbon rule of Sicily, from 1829, the Department of Statistics of the Kingdom, required every town of the island to write charter for the revision of the borders of each territory. Susequently, from 1833, in order to rationalize tax collection, the revision of the cadastre was begun. In the first case, the papers produced by local technicians were often carried out by employing inexact, if particularly expressive and interesting, representation techniques. In the second case, the drawings produced for the revision of the cadastre generally met the highest standards of European cartography, which were later generally adopted in Italy during Napoleonic rule. In the first half of the XIX century, during a period of only 30 years, and with the coming of the Unification of Italy, Sicily, which was suspended between atavic underdevelopment and the prospect of flourishing development, provided itself with cartographic archives of more than 500 papers and related documents.

The development of legislation to establish the construction of cemeteries as public facilities in consideration of public health issues originated in France during the Age of Enlightenment. This concept began taking root in Sicily and in the South of Italy with a slight delay in comparison with the other European countries. Further, more substantial delays are due to the fact that some municipalities have never observed the rules issued by King Ferdinand I since 1817, nor those established by the new Savoy kingdom after the unification of Italy. In the outline of the events related to the creation of the cemeteries in Eastern Sicily, the events of Piazza (Armerina since 1862), one of the main centres of the administrative system of the island (it was district capital since 1812, then subintendency and seat of bishopric since 1817), represent an interesting case study for the reconstruction of a debate which started just after the Bourbon law and ended during the 1880’s with the opening of two separate public cemeteries.

This essay is about the urban growth of Siracusa between the nineteenth and twentieth century. It reconstructs its expansion from the pulling down of the city walls until the first World War when the course of the building trade starts with the first urban development plan in 1917. It concerns three different areas: the first was drafted in the urban development plan dated 1889, the so called «zona umbertina», while the other two centres were growing in areas not mentioned in the urban plan, the small villages of Santa Lucia’s and Sant’Antonio, which would eventually be included in the urban development plan of 1917. This essay addresses some specific questions. What kind of social class, and with what function and role, has been involved in the growth? What kind of languages, rhetoric, and culture has supported it? What kind of formal, juridical means have regulated it? Does the growth phase determine a rational and functional organization of the territory? How are natural resources, such as water, used in those territories involved in urban development?