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The article examines the beginning of the Western historiography of military architecture, starting from the work of Enrico Rocchi, military engineer, historian and officer of the Corps of Engineers of the Italian Royal Army between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The most recent contributions of Western thought on the subject of military architecture are identified, which from the end of the Cold War onwards was in-tended in a much broader way than in the whole of the twentieth century starting right from the work of Rocchi. The recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have in fact revolutionized the idea of war in an important way, especially on the US and British sides. In cascade, this has led all Western military doctrine to widespread use of the culture of the peoples to be fought as a real adaptive weapon, as Enrico Rocchi did more than a century ago for Italy. Only by retracing the mentality and culture of the military engineers who founded the discipline of the history of Western military architecture and at the same time realized the defenses of a European kingdom of their time, that of Italy, is it possible to explain the two phacts to be the same point of view, also linked to cultural anthropology understood as a fundamental discipline like historiography to develop lessons learned.

The paper deals with the discovery of an unpublished project by means of a surface assault boat in the Archive of the Historical Office of the Italian Navy. Made in January 1915, the project predates Italy’s entry into the First World War and testifies to the early interest of the Royal Italian Navy for unconventional naval assault operations which in 1918 led to the forcing of the Austro-Hungarian port of Pula in the Adriatic Sea. The project is examined in detail and compared with contemporary projects for other and more well-known types of surface assault boats, in particular with those of anti-submarine motorboats (MAS) wanted by the chief of staff of the Italian Navy of the time, the vice admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel. In parallel, the project is also considered as a fundamental anticipation of what was subsequently achieved from 1939 onwards with the surface and underwater assault boats always used by the Italian Navy during the Second World War in the Mediterranean and in the Black Sea.