Masons, nobles and viceroys. Building techniques in ancien régime Sicily. Catalan vaults in Poggioreale

The new towns founded in Sicily between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries – more than 150, with a climax in the first half of the seventeenth century – allow us to reflect on the construction history in ancien régime Sicily and specifically on the reception of an imported vaults’ construction model, referred to as Catalan vaults. After a brief resumé of the state-of-the-art on the diffusion of tile vaults, the paper focuses on the ancient city of Poggioreale, founded in 1642 and abandoned after the violent Belice earthquake of 1968. The old settlement’s urban layout and construction systems are still perfectly recognisable, and this condition allows us to analyse the techniques used in the seventeenth century for its foundation. Among these, that used for the vaults is visible because of the numerous collapses that often reveal their sections. The vaults are made of rubble stones and gypsum binder, all of them have counter-vaults on the extrados, and their springs seem to rely just on the roughness of the contact’s surfaces without any housing, either projecting or recessed, in the walls. The paper aims to analyse the particular construction type of the Poggioreale vaults by framing it within the panorama of thin vaults in seventeenth century Sicily and their variants, using additional examples found on the island (that hint at a more conspicuous local presence than can be currently recorded.