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Architecture in sinking: Florence’s sixteenth-century navigable canal and the supply of building materials

par Martino, Davide
Référence Architecture in Rising: Building Sites in Europe, c. 1400–1700 (04-06/06/2026: Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture (CSCA), University of Cambridge, UK)
Publication Non publié, 2025-06-05

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

In the 1560s the rulers of Tuscany, the Medici, had a navigable waterway dug to the west of Florence. This canal was intended to bypass the Arno, and thereby realise a Florentine pipe dream which had enthralled the likes of Leonardo da Vinci. Though opened to traffic in the early 1570s, the canal fell out of use so quickly that its original purpose has been forgotten by Florentines and scholars alike. Rescuing the history of this ambitious piece of infrastructure from oblivion, this paper deploys it to illustrate two arguments. First, building sites in Europe, c. 1400–1700, were not only about rising structures but also about sinking them: digging canals, dredging harbours, and excavating mines. Hydraulic knowledge, technologies, and techniques were exchanged in such lowly locales as much as on the lofty heights of scaffolding. As this paper shows, these conversations involved court architects as much as peasant labourers. Second, hydraulic infrastructure was key to source and convey building materials. In the premodern age, transport was faster, cheaper, and more reliable over water than overland. This was precisely the reason for digging Florence’s navigable canal in the first place: during its brief period of operation, several construction tools and components transited back and forth—most prominently one of the Medici’s monolithic columns, intended for erection in a Florentine square. Thus, not only should canal projects like the present one be considered building sites: they were also an essential part of the supply chain of early modern architecture in rising.