A Geometrical Analysis of the Layout of Acaya, Italy

Abstract

The analysis of the urban fabric contained within the city walls of the town of Acaya, made possible by a new integrated survey involving manual, topographical, photogrammetric and 3D laserscan techniques, has cast doubts on the conventional attribution of the city layout to Gian Giacomo dell’Acaya. A rectangular layout consisting of six blocks divided by six longitudinal streets and three lateral streets is indicative of a medieval date. The geometrical analysis shows how the site of the ancient town of Salappya was transformed by Charles I d’Anjou in 1273, renaming it Segine, and how, in about 1500, Alfonso dell’Acaya enlarged the city and its walls according to the same proportional criteria. In 1536 Gian Giacomo dell’Acaya succeeded his father as Baron, redesigning the city walls in order to make them suitable lines of defense against firearms, renaming the city Acaya.

Architect Giampiero Mele received his Ph.D. in “Survey and Representation of architecture and the environment” at the University of Florence in 2000, and a Ph.D. in “Architectural and Urban Design” from the Universitè di Paris 8 in 2004. Since 2010 he has been a researcher at the Università Telematica Uniecampus, and professor of descriptive geometry at the University of Ferrara. His fields of research are the relationships between geometry and arithmetic in historic architecture, and drawing in architecture and design. He has given talks at various conferences in these fields, and is the author of numerous papers, the most important of which are: “Mesure et proportion dans la Loge de la Signoria à Florence” (Revue XYZ, Association Française de Topographie, no. 98, 2004); “Dalla geometria una regola per il disegno delle chiese medievali tra XIII e XIV secolo” (self-published, Florence, 2004); “Architettura gotica e disegno urbano: la piazza e i fronti verso il centro antico” in Musso e non quadro: la strana figura di Palazzo Vecchio dal suo rilievo, M.T. Bartoli, E. Fossi and G. Mele, eds. (Florence: Edifir, 2007).