I disegni degli ingegneri granducali in Toscana tra memoria e conoscenza

At the beginning of the 18th century, the Lorena family in Tuscany opens a season of important reforms of all technical and administrative apparatus of the Grand Duchy, promoting a great project of territorial transformations and renewal of its infrastructures. Railways, roads, drainages, river and coast settlements are working fields, in which the Tuscan engineers, not only contribute decisively to support the new economic development, but activate an impressive process of redefining the idea of site and anthropic space. This paper intends to trace, through the analysis of a selected series of drawings by Grand Duke engineers, the development of hydraulic events, which have deeply influenced man's relationship with his environment and is still the living testimony of a right way of planning. In particular reclamation areas are privileged lands to test the role of science and technology in the definition of new paradigms of meaning and unexpected mode of perception of landscape