PS21 Architecture and Mediation in Medieval Port Cities: Italy and the Mediterranean

During the medieval and early modern periods, the Sicilian port city of Palermo witnessed dramatic changes that recalibrated the city’s relationship to its maritime hinterland. In the earliest phases of intervention, aggressive land reclamation efforts and a building boom redrew the littoral, generating new patterns of mercantile exchange. Later, bastioned fortifications designed by itinerant engineers with experience in military outposts in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa circumscribed the so-called Cala, Palermo’s ancient mouth to the sea. By the second half of the sixteenth century, this tightly-choreographed system was disrupted by the construction of the Molo Nuovo to the city’s north. Designed by an Italian active in Spanish ports, Palermo’s new harbor was divorced from the spatial and commercial dynamics of the urban core. This paper argues that water nonetheless permeated fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Palermo, both literally (in the city’s maritime infrastructure), and figuratively (in its very ideation as a port city). Throughout Palermo’s history, I will show, port design and urban planning were two sides of the same coin. Paralleling construction activity at the waterfront, a series of interventions transformed the constructed space of the city. Foremost among them was the extension of the Cassaro, Palermo’s perfectly-straight axis, directly to the littoral, reactivating a fundamental – even primeval – connection between city and sea. So too was the street a hydrological conduit, linking the city to its vast arable surroundings through underground cisterns and channels. By rethinking how the infrastructure of water was implicated in Palermo’s urban development, this paper suggests that medieval and early modern port cities tapped into what we might understand as a theory of ecological regionalism before its time – a collective sensitivity to the role of the natural topography in shaping the form, function, and identity of urban environments.

During the 12th and 13th centuries, as the Adriatic Sea began to engage in intensive maritime trade, it also played host to a rich exchange of architectural ideas. The famous inter-coastal leaps of Eustasius of Trani, master mason of the cathedral of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), and Simone of Ragusa, sculptor at S. Maria Maggiore in Barletta, may exemplify a deeper pattern.

Scholars have long discussed the problem of pan-Adriatic master masons and sculptors, but have thus far focused on questions of attribution. This paper asks what social conditions encouraged builders to travel and permanently relocate between coastlines. A close reading of the Eustasius records suggests that this Trani-based mason moved to Ragusa because of the latter's laws concerning the rights of citizens and foreigners. Professionals traveling between Adriatic cities were entitled to many of the same rights as local citizens. This trend may be related to the intercity Adriatic trade pacts of the same time period, and the concept of consanguinitas ('shared blood') that they invoked.

This paper considers not only the written record, but also the bounty of close technical similarities between Italian and Dalmatian coastal buildings. I propose that the pan-Adriatic circulation of architectural knowledge expanded alongside the relaxation of citizenship laws in port towns. By opening themselves to long-distance trade and ideas of consanguinitas, the ports of the Adriatic also reached out to a larger market of architectural talent. A city's architectural language, along with its very identity, lay increasingly between places.