La Strada Beretta: 1666-1702. Il contributo della Rappresentazione

Looking at the renewed debate on the figure of Milanese military engineer Gaspare Beretta (1620-1703), the contribution is one of the results of a research path more than twenty years old. We propose the analysis of a set of drawings related to the Strada Beretta and preserved in the Historical Archive of the City of Milan - Biblioteca Trivulziana, the State Archive of Milan and the Archivo General de Simancas. Although representing the same artefact, the drawings - variously signed, but still attributable to Beretta’s entourage - report precise heterogeneous information on the route of the road, formalizing on paper the stretch between the cities of Finale Ligure and Acqui Terme, or between Finale and Alessandria. The methodologies used are those of the Representation, aimed at welding traditional knowledge and practices with the most innovative and updated ones. This allows to confirm cultural and practical matrices (recognizable or hypothetical) both in the work of Gaspare Beretta, and in that of his collaborators. For example, there is the coexistence of different visual codes with types of signs, symbolic and iconographic, somehow analytical-descriptive, to support the critical aims of drawings.