Room 6
THE URBAN PLANNING OF THE FLORENTINE TERRE NUOVE
The urban plans for the New Lands commissioned by Florence show, even today, how sophisticated the studies in mathematics and geometry underlying them were. The use of proportions and the creation of streets enclosed within a rectangular plan are quite distinctive: this is why in the room we find the reconstruction of the groma, a surveyor’s instrument that had been used to trace out new towns, districts and streets since the time of the ancient Romans. The plans of Castel San Giovanni and Terra Santa Maria (Terranuova Bracciolini) also show that the streets, starting from the central road, the Via Maestra, become narrower and narrower near the walls, conforming to a precise calculation of proportions.
AN ELEGANT ‘DESIGN’
The Florentine Terre Nuove constitute just five of the approximately one thousand settlements founded in the late Middle Ages across the European continent and the British Isles. They are not the earliest foundations, let alone the largest, but they are certainly the most elegant. This refinement is a consequence of the building process of the city of Florence itself: a process we know from a unique set of documents preserved in the great Florentine State Archives that identify the individuals who were assigned administrative and building duties, and – though not always – the names of the building professionals responsible for the design.
The Florentine Terre Nuove were planned on the basis of plans that imposed a sort of physical order: many of the plans are orthogonal, that is, structured by straight streets and right-angled intersections. After all, orthogonality was the only known system of rationalisation of space in the Middle Ages because, before the development of geometric surveying in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, non-orthogonal spaces could only be considered informally. And, above all, their surface area could only be measured with great difficulty. Lots for building houses were rented or assigned according to their size and location: all rationalised precisely by an orthogonal system of rectilinear streets, blocks and rectangular lots. In itself, orthogonality only produced rationality, but it was far from assuring something akin to what we now call design: it did not establish a spatial heritage, it did not organise the community and it did not produce meaning. Instead, the plans of the centres founded by Florence did all these things by placing civil, religious and social institutions around an open space in the centre of the plans, dividing the residential area into symmetrically arranged neighbourhoods, each with a distinct identity defined by the original origin of the population settled within it and by the intersection of the two roads that ran between the four gates of the defensive walls.
The structure of the neighbourhoods was defined by the size of the housing lots, and the logic of the spatial distribution responded to a well-defined idea: the main street contained deeper, – that is, larger lots – while the secondary streets were shallower although the width of the lots remained the same. At San Giovanni and Terra Santa Maria (today: Terranuova Bracciolini), the geometry of the circle, in particular the relationship between the length of the chords and the degrees of the arc they subtend (a geometry illustrated in the Museum), established the depth of the lots and thus the thickness of the blocks. With similar care, the central square of the two projects was assigned significant dimensions: at San Giovanni, the square has proportions of 4:1.
(The text is taken from the museum guide, edited by Claudia Tripodi and Valentina Zucchi, Sagep, 2024)
