Stratification and metamorphosis of an urban landscape: the ancient fortification of Sorrento

The ancient walls of Sorrento currently represent only a small portion of a much larger fortification that has marked the history of the city since its founding. The original orographic shape of the settlement – defended on two sides by ravines and on a third by the high falesia overlooking the sea – has greatly influenced the structure and the successive transformations of the city wall, which is configured as a palimpsest of ancient stratifications . The first defensive fence of the tufa terrace was closely linked to the roman penetration in the Sarno valley (IV cent. BC). Over the centuries, the fortification has undergone significant changes, starting with the construction of towers to defend the city gates in the Middle Ages until the intervention on the south side in 1558. As emerged from archival research, the project was sponsored by the Spanish viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo after the Saracen invasion and was accomplished by the engineer Pedro Trevigno; he planned the rebuilding of the southern curtain with the addition of four bastions – one cuneiform and three flat – which irregularities, compared to the military architecture standards, was due to the need to adapt the demand of defense to the characteristics of the perimeter. The southern portion of the fortification is the only surviving part to the significant urban transformations that affected the city since the nineteenth century. Considering this introduction, the paper will deepen the knowledge of the fortification, highlighting the evolution of its relationship with the urban context of the city of Sorrento. Starting from the study of the surviving material traces and unpublished sources – either archival or iconographic – related to the transformation of the viceroyal period, the essay will focus on the complex stratification, with the radical changes that led to the current settlement of the defense system, as well as, on the comparative analysis of contemporary infrastructures in order to highlight differences and similarities from a morphological point of view and how they adjusted to particular orographic conditions.