La città fortificata. Mantova nelle mappe ottocentesche del Kriegsarchiv di Vienna

This book presents about 200 maps and topographical and project drawings, conserved in the Vienna "Kriegsarchiv", regarding over a century of Mantuan history and particularly from the Restoration to the unity of Italy, when the town and its territory were gradually transformed into military ramparts and strongholds of the Austrian defence in Italy. The authoress, director of the State Archives in Mantua, by means of an historical introduction and the cataloguing of each cartographic document, concludes her long research on the sources of the Viennese archives, and offers the reader unpublished material for studying the Mantuan architectural and planning history of the 19th century. These Viennese maps enable to reconstruct the fortified town through the defence buildings that re-styled its urbanistic structure; they constitute, therefore, a unique heritage for the description of Mantua after the Gonzaga period and that of Therese of Austria, and moreover tell that military architecture, as much as the civilian one, creates an "imago urbis" that marked the town during the 19th century. This book is completed by an introduction to the "fortified" history of Mantua, signed by Lino Vittorio Bozzetto, authoritative expert in military architecture; by a bibliography and by an index of names and places.