Augmented Iconography. AR applications to the fortified Turin in the Theatrum Sabaudiae

Until the early nineteenth century, when it was occupied by the French which dismantled the fortifications, Turin was a city delimited by walls. Since the Roman age, four fortified perimeters happen in time. In the Baroque age, following the transfer to Turin of the capital of the Duchy of Savoy (1563) which involved the construction of the Citadel (1564), the ancient “square city” was the subject of three expansions: to the south (1618), east (1673) and west (1719), which generated the so-called “almond” shape. As well as the square city, where cardo and decumanus guided the tracking of minor streets, baroque expansions structure themselves along rector axes that ruled the urban plan of the areas annexed to the city. Only the so called Porta Palatina today survives, the other three Roman gates were superseded or complemented by new baroque gates, which generated new accesses to the city. Several iconographies represent the fortified baroque city: among them one of the most famous is that of Theatrum Sabaudiae. The original book is preserved in the Archivio Storico della Città di Torino, but it is reproduced and widely diffused as an anastatic copy. The authors that previously studied the relationships between the walls, the Citadel, and the gates, collected a lot of iconographies and produced interpretative digital drawings and models, in this paper propose an application of AR to the city map in the Theatrum useful to share to the scholars their results and the most important sources.