A Military Building Project for the Defense of Naples in the Post-Unification 19th Century

After the Unification of Italy, the city of Naples did not suffer any particular militarisation. In addition to the reinforcement of castle defences, the monasteries suppressed during the French Decade and the subsequent Bourbon era underwent a change of use into care centres as a result of the damage caused by the war. The few new projects for city defence structures arose in strategic positions, allowing control of the territory in all directions. The Istituto Storico e di Cultura dell’Arma del Genio (ISCAG) preserves around four hundred cartographies of the Neapolitan territory, which depict the military presence in the city since the early 19th century. Among the reproductions, a project from the 1880s concerning a territorial area that was profoundly modified in the following centuries is of particular interest. The project relates to a closed construction to be built on the Camaldoli hill, containing plans and sections of the new fortification to be erected, and complete with a conservative variant concerning the preservation of the 16th-century church. The contribution intends to analyse the militarisation projects that were to be established in pleasant, panoramic and uncontaminated places in the Neapolitan landscape, which within a few decades would no longer be recognisable due to the damage caused above all by post-war speculation. Through the critical investigation of graphic and iconographic sources, the final objective of this work is the construction of a digital model of the projects that, appropriately inserted into a digital territorial context, will make it possible to visualise the Neapolitan hills in the particular connotation that the new interventions would have given them.