Aspetti della viabilità di una capitale d'Antico regime

Aspects of an Ancien Régime Capital City's Transport System Paola Sereno The choice of Turin as capital of the Savoy state in 1563 triggered a series of territorial poli-cies aimed at strengthening the role of the city in its regional context while, at the same time, concentrating its institutional functions. The organization and development of the road network was one of the fundamental elements in these policies, the object of attention from the Savoy court on a number of occasions, in terms of both regulations and planning, up to the creation of the General Surveyorship of Bridges and Roads in the eighteenth cen¬tury. This paper introduces a reinterpretation of road transport politics, implemented in the modern era by the absolute state, from the point of view of the city which stood at the heart of them, starting with the intricate work of identifying the public nature of the road axes. Perusal of the town council's rulings, together with technical reports, topographies, visitor descriptions, opinions, statutory regulations and royal decrees, on the one hand brings to light the costs that the city was called on to bear in order to sustain the State’'s road policy and, on the other, highlights the marginal role played by the city authorities in the whole business, since they were recipients of dispositions but not players in the planning and deci¬sion-making phases. The role played by the Vicario is then examined, responsible for the city's roads and the institutional intermediary between the town council and the court. The city also often had to maintain the road system in the countryside outside the city, a neces¬sary condition for an efficient practicability of the network. In particular, the transit of the water courses, assured by wooden or stone bridges or by "porti" (ferry boats), was much hampered during the centuries of the modern age by climatic conditions, with heavy rain¬falls and consequent flooding. In their turn, the rivers were an element in a chain of struc¬tural relations that produced tangible modifications in the physical landscape: the shifting river beds, especially that of the Stura, represented a factor of instability in the transport system. A further intervention on the road system was connected to the ring of Savoy resi¬dences extra moenia, or outside town, linked to the capital city by “allee” or tree-lined avenues, planted with elms alone their entire length. These provided a characterizing land¬scape element to the local scale of the transport system, and were also one of the bonds in the relations between local powers and absolute powers.