Naples 1540: the Don Pedro de Toledo’s Strada Reale. Historical urban analysis and digital cartography

The "Strada Reale", later Strada Toledo, was carried out in the mid-sixteenth century and it was the main axis of the urban expansion wanted by the Spanish viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo. The plan, based on the new settlement of Quartieri Spagnoli and on the construction of wider urban walls, was aimed at the strategic-military redesign of the city, incorporating for the first time the hills of San Martino and Pizzofalcone with the defensive poles of Castel Sant'Elmo and Castel dell'Ovo. Far from being a master plan and, therefore, from addressing the actual urban problems, this expansion favored, until the early eighteenth century, an uncontrolled land exploitation by the noble and ecclesiastical classes, in the face of an enormous growth of extramural villages. The "Strada Reale" hosted along its façades some sumptuous palaces of the Spanish and Neapolitan nobility, connecting them to the management and representative pole which developed around the viceroy palace. Based on the recent studies of CIRICE aimed at the construction of an interactive digital map of Naples during the modern age, the paper proposes a new reading of this important street and of its context with the use of digital cartography applied to the historical and iconographic sources.