Antonio Pellicanò
Del periodo giovanile di Galileo Galilei. 
Il trattato di fortificazione. 
Alle radici del pensiero scientifico e dell'urbanistica moderna
Gangemi Editore, Roma, 2001

Presentation
Prof. Alessandro Bianchi 
Ordinario di Urbanistica e Rettore dell'Università di Reggio Calabria

The presentation of the complex and particular book of Antonino Pellicanò, is in itself a difficult task, and even more difficult as it is already introduced on a scientific level by a preface, an introduction and a premise. I will limit myself, therefore, instead of a further and probably superfluous presentation, to express certain brief considerations about three aspects which seem  to me to characterize the work in an original way.

The first regards the highlighting of a dimension completely particular of the conceptual universe of Galileo, referring to architecture and, although it is ante litteram, also to town planning. 
It is a well known fact that the great Pisan scientist belonged to the current of thought that in a period of little more than a hundred years - starting from "De revolutionibus orbium celestium" of Nikolaj Kopernik (1543) passing through the "Astronomia nova" of Joannes Keplero  (1609) and the "Dialogo dei massimi sistemi del mondo" of Galileo Galilei (1632), and finishing with the "Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica" by Isaac Newton (1687) makes up the  'episteme' of  physics, and more generally, of modern science.
Certainly less well known, not to say completely unknown, is the part without doubt a minor work, about the Galilean scientific thought which emerges from the two texts brought to light by Antonino Pellicanò: the "Trattato di Fortificazione" and the "Breve instruzione dell'Architettura Militare".
If, as the author notes, the attitude that Galileo has in these two brief treatises is - even  if it is  outside the range of what is prevalent in the tradition of manuals, as vehicles for the imparting of practical knowledge - that of a moment of theoretical reflection and principles, and if  this reflection is about the problems which  characterize the form and the function of towns between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I believe it would be of great interest to town planners  to study the relationship of these works with two slightly earlier but very well known works - the "De re aedificatoria"  by Leon Battista Alberti (1452-1485) and Thomas More's "Utopia", to which Choay (La regle et le modele, Seuil, 1980) attributes the value of basic texts  of that scientific - literary production  which, from the mid nineteenth century, establishes  the foundation of modern town planning.

The second consideration is very close  to the previous one, because it refers to the relationship between the ideal city and the real city.
The former belongs to the current  which has its greatest formal expression in the fifty-four cities  of "Insula Utopia" described by Raphael Hitloday and in  "Città del Sole" described by the Genuan "Nochiero del Colombo".
An image creating, dreamlike narrative thread, which will reveal itself particularly fertile if in the eighteenth century it gives life to a wider production of plans for ideal cities - from the Cabet's "Icaria", to Owen's "New Harmony", to Fourier's "Falansterio", to Godin's "Familisterio" - but which, in order to give birth to modern town-planning, will need to meet and mingle with another equally important current, which will be affermed only some time later by the tecnological revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century: that of urban engineering.

And it is the latter  which, in my opinion, should be linked to Galileo's point of view emerging from the two works in question, particularly the one about fortifications  which, as the Author notes, represents a formidable break with the preceding interpretations  about the construction of new cities, and in which any reference to the ideal city permeating the construction of fortification  all through the sixteenth century has completely disappeared.
My third and last consideration regards  the point of view and text constructions  adopted by the Author when composing his work, as well as the cultural attitude which emerges.
The point of view- that of historians of architecture and of the city - and the  expository structure are not easy to find in the literary production  of architects and town planners, whose historical preparation is quite rare and whose planning ability leads them to work best on projects, and usually makes them less accurate (and, therefore, less credible) in researching and expounding.
It deserves to be underlined that in Pellicanò's work the study of the sources, the comparison of  interpretations - but also the apparatus of the notes, the quotations and bibliographical references, if we consider the more technical aspects - form a unitary work of a very wide range, characterized by a sound scientific rigour.
As for the cultural attitude, the great attention and the natural inclination  of the author towards  experimentation which, as he himself states several times, represents currently one of the limits of the subjects that deal with territorial interventions and that in itself assumes and recommends as a working method.
And it deserves to be emphasized, because it is a typical Galilean feature.