Room 5
THE LATE MEDIEVAL URBAN REVOLUTION
Between the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th, Europe was gripped by a sort of “town-planning fever”: some small villages were levelled so that the land could be built on, others were adapted to new urban needs. Creating a new town was something of a gamble for the founders, however. This room has a series of multimedia displays that explore both completed projects and some literary background: these include the ideal city described by a Catalan priest named Francesc Eiximenis between 1381 and 1386.
THE IDEAL CITY
The earthly city has been and is a mirror of a heavenly city, which exists already and not yet, in which all our limitations – natural resources, peaceful coexistence, health and happiness, the values of community and the public good – find eternal fulfilment. Such were the pre-Columbian cities and the Greek poleis; so was the Roman civitas; so were the newly founded medieval centres and the perfect cities of the Renaissance; so were the industrial and garden cities of the early twentieth century and so are the new cities dreamt of and planned in recent years. A constant, with countless outcomes, is the attempt to establish a balanced relationship with the earth and mankind. As the architect Georg Münter wrote in the 1950s, the ideal city is ‘an imaginary city that succeeds in realising the material and spiritual desires that a given epoch sees in the foundation of a city in an ideal way and in a precise, so to speak scientific-mathematical form’.
The last book of the Bible, the Apocalypse, still looks to the celestial city, depicting not an abstract place in its last pages but a precise, defined, measured urban space:
And [the city] had a wall great and high, and had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels […] And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, a hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. […] And the twelve gates were twelve pearls […] and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass. […] In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life.
(The text is taken from the museum guide, edited by Claudia Tripodi and Valentina Zucchi, Sagep, 2024)
