Pianta della Città di Firenze rilevata esattamente nell’Anno 1783, e dedicata a S.A.R. Pietro Leopoldo P.R. di Ungh. e di Boe. e Granduca di Toscana.

Description

The Map of a City Being Remade: the Complete Leopoldine Transformation of Florence.

This monumental six-sheet copperplate plan of Florence (Pianta della Città di Firenze rilevata esattamente nell’Anno 1783, surveyed and drawn by the engineer, architect, and land surveyor Francesco Magnelli and engraved by Cosimo Zocchi) was dedicated to His Royal Highness Pietro Leopoldo, Prince Royal of Hungary and Bohemia and Grand Duke of Tuscany, in whose service it was made. It is, as Leonardo Rombai has written in Toscana Geometrica (Florence, IGM, 2008), a fundamental moment in Florentine historical cartography: the first plan of the city produced with comparable precision since Ferdinando Ruggeri’s of 1731, and the most detailed and accurate representation of Florence that had yet been made.

Assembled from six sheets on linen, the map measures nearly 5 ft 3 in by 4 ft 10 in. It served simultaneously as a precise urban survey, a celebration of Leopoldine good governance, and a working document of the reform program — recording completed interventions, works in progress, and the planned new uses of the suppressed religious buildings annotated throughout.

The Map in Detail

The plan is oriented with south at the top, inverting the conventional reading of the city by placing the Fortezza da Basso at the lower margin. The Arno River cuts diagonally across the composition from upper left to lower right, labeled FIUME ARNO in large letters across the water. The city is divided into its four historic quarters: Quartiere Croce, Quartiere S. Giovanni, Quartiere S.M. Novella, and Quartiere Spirito. Streets, piazzas, churches, and public buildings are rendered in precise plan, with gardens and open ground differentiated from the built fabric. The walls of the city with their gates are shown complete.

One particularly spectacular section of the plan is that of Palazzo Pitti, labeled here Palazzo Reale, the royal residence of the reigning Lorraine sovereigns to whom the map is dedicated. Rising up the hillside behind it, the Boboli Gardens are rendered in remarkable detail: the great amphitheater immediately behind the palace, the elaborate geometric parterres, the radiating paths, the circular garden rooms, the long cypress avenue of the Viottolone extending toward the upper right, and the oval Isolotto visible in the distance. The engraver has taken evident care with the garden — its hedges, boschi, and water features are individually differentiated, giving a sense of the layered complexity of a garden that had been accumulating for two and a half centuries since Eleanor of Toledo commissioned it from Tribolo in 1549. At the upper left, the Fortezza di Belvedere — the star-plan fortification built by Buontalenti for Ferdinando I in the 1590s — commands the hill above the gardens, its bastions and outworks shown in precise ichnographic plan.

Along the bottom of the sheet, six engraved architectural vignettes depict the monuments of Florence in perspective, forming a gallery of the city’s principal buildings. The left side carries three views: at left, Veduta del Ponte a S. Trinita della Chiesa di S. Trinita e della Colonna inalzata da Cosimo primo — the Ponte Santa Trinita, the church beyond, and the Column of Justice surmounted by its figure of Astraea, erected on Cosimo I’s orders with an ancient shaft brought from Rome; at center, Veduta degli Ufizj sia Curia Fiorentina presa dalla Loggia presso Arno — the Uffizi seen from within its loggia looking toward the Palazzo Vecchio and the Piazza della Signoria, one of the great perspectival views of Florentine architecture; at right, Veduta del Real Palazzo de Pitti abitazione de Regnanti Sovrani — the Palazzo Pitti shown in full façade as the residence of the reigning Lorraine sovereigns.

The right side presents three further views: at left, Veduta della Metropolitana Fiorentina, e del Battistero di S. Gio. Battista — the Duomo and Baptistery seen together; at center, Veduta della Piazza e Chiesa di S. Giovannino de PP. Gesuiti ora de PP. Scolopj, o de Palazzi dei SS. March. Riccardi, e Panciatichi — the church of San Giovannino, identified in its caption as formerly belonging to the Jesuits and now transferred to the Piarists, a direct reference to the suppression of the Society of Jesus by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, with the flanking palaces of the Riccardi and Panciatichi families; at right, Veduta del Regio Spedale, e Piazza di S. Mᵃ Nuova — the Royal Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova with its piazza. Taken together, the six vignettes constitute a considered selection of Florentine institutions: civic, religious, dynastic, charitable — the city as it wished to be seen in 1783, in its Enlightenment Lorraine moment, before the revolutions that would follow.

Historical Context

Pianta della Città di Firenze rilevata esattamente nell’Anno 1783 belongs to one of the great traditions of Enlightenment cartography: the monumental city plan, produced at a large scale and with high ambition, that flourished across Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. The model and inspiration for the entire genre was Giovanni Battista Nolli’s Nuova Pianta di Roma of 1748 — twelve sheets, an ichnographic survey of extraordinary precision, which set the standard for what a city plan could be: not merely a diagram of streets but a comprehensive scientific and visual document of urban space in all its complexity. Nolli’s Rome demonstrated that a city could be rendered with the same rigor applied to natural history or astronomy, and the response across Europe was a generation of comparable projects. Plans of Paris, Vienna, Naples, Venice, and the great cities of the German states followed, each shaped by Enlightenment assumptions about documentation, measurement, and the relationship between civic order and geographical knowledge.

In Tuscany, the impulse was sharpened by the reforming administration of Grand Duke Leopold I, who governed Florence from 1765 to 1790 as one of the most active enlightened rulers in Europe — modernizing law, restructuring institutions, and fostering precisely the kind of systematic intellectual enterprise that his capital’s comprehensive plan represented. The Florence plan of 1783 sits at the mature moment of this tradition, when the monumental city plan had become both a prestige object and a civic statement: proof that a city knew itself, had measured itself, and intended to be remembered.

Publication History and Census

Drawn by Francesco Magnelli (documented 1779–1783), engineer, architect, and land surveyor; engraved by Cosimo Zocchi (Florence, 1747 – documented until 1787). Florence, 1783. It had been fifty-two years since the last scientific mapping of the city: Ruggeri’s 1731 plan. Magnelli’s survey, backed by the full resources of the Leopoldine administration, filled that gap definitively.

We found only one other instance of this map on the market in the last 30 years, and only three records of institutional holdings: the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid.