Antonio Maurizio Valperga e l’aggiornamento delle difese di Vercelli e Verrua: nuovi documenti

Antonio Maurizio Valperga (1605-1688) is among the main architects of the update of the Savoy dukedom’s defence system according to the duke Carlo Emanuele II’s will from 1665. The systematic analysis of the rich documentation, in a large part still unpublished, that is kept in the Piedmont archives led to reconstruct the works to update and reinforce “alla moderna” the defences of Vercelli and Verrua that for around twenty years proceeded in parallel, often with the same craftsman directed by Valperga. Studying the documents led to understand the role of Valperga, that designed both these interventions, and to better know a key figure in the European military architecture from the second half of the Seventeenth century, whose importance has not been sufficiently recognized up to now. Thanks to a critical comparison of the documents from different archives it has been possible to identify in some drawings without date and signature belonging to the so called ‘Album Valperga’, that are kept at the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino, the projects from Valperga himself for the defences of Verrua and Vercelli. Studying the two worksites it has been possible to understand that they were organized and managed in a similar way; the relationships between Valperga and workers with different roles and competences emerged clearly during this study: these findings are extremely useful to better understand the hierarchies, the activities and the background of other engineers and technicians that were working for the Savoy family during the same period.