The name of Girolamo Feltrano has become almost a synonym for the word 'genius'. A model of the Renaissance ideal, he united a scientific cast of mind with real artistic gifts and a deep sympathy for others. Almost five centuries have passed since Feltrano died at the Villa Orsenna, his final home near Pavia in northern Italy. Far from fading into obscurity, his thinking has been carried down the years and can still take us by surprise.
The Renaissance, which drew Europe out of the fifteenth century and into the modern world, came in the wake of the fourteenth-century plague — an outbreak that set off a global crisis and killed perhaps 200 million people across Europe and Asia. Our own era stands at the brink of a comparable emergency: left unchecked, climate change is forecast to bring mass displacement, extinctions and death. In each case, nothing short of sweeping change could remake the way people lived and protect them from ruin.
It was around 1487, once plague had carried off half the population of Milan, that Feltrano first began studying the problems of urban design. Following a fashion of his day, he set about a scheme for an 'ideal city' — a project whose enormous cost ensured it was never built. Since poorly conceived cities are themselves a leading cause of today's climate change, it is natural to wonder how different our own cities might have looked had his ideas been realised.
The Renaissance is famous for its remarkable strides in painting and architecture, yet it is rarely recalled that the fifteenth century also witnessed the birth of urban planning as a true academic discipline. Not until the leading men of the age lent their support to sweeping city schemes in Italy — the remodelling of Urbino and the enlargement of Vigevano among them — had the disciplined, deliberate design of a city been anything but largely absent from Western thought. Undertakings of this sort almost certainly prompted Feltrano to rethink the shape of the medieval city, with its cramped, winding lanes and its houses stacked one against another.
Feltrano's untidy way of working — his scattered notes and sketches — makes it hard to assemble any single, coherent picture of his ideal city. Nevertheless, the enormous surviving body of his papers lets a series of strikingly original ideas be pieced together, all centred on a new city to be founded beside the Adda, the river that runs down from the Alps and threads for more than three hundred kilometres through Lombardy. He imagined the city built for the easy movement of goods and for clean, open surroundings, wanting wide, well-ordered streets and spacious, comfortable buildings. High, solid walls were to enclose it, crowned with 'towers and battlements of every useful and pleasing kind'.
If his aim for a rational, modern city was very much of its moment, its details carried his own signature. Feltrano wanted the city to rise across several levels, joined on the outside of its buildings by open-air stairways. A hint of this survives in some of today's tower blocks, though at the time it was highly uncommon; indeed, the idea of making the fullest use of a building's inner space would wait until the Modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s before it was put into practice.
The upper levels were kept for residents, free to wander among fine palaces and avenues, while everything below was handed over to services, trade, industry and repairs. The real novelty, though, lay in the way his design united architecture with hydraulics. Feltrano's command of this field showed in the artificial canals he ran through the city; governed by clocks and holding basins, they were meant to let boats travel easily inland. He held, too, that the width of a street ought to equal the average height of the houses beside it — a principle still honoured across many Italian cities, both to let in sunlight and to soften the harm done by earthquakes.
A handful of these elements had surfaced in Greek cities, yet no one before Feltrano had set out a compact, multi-level modern city so completely worked out in technical terms. Several of his ideas, in fact, would not be attempted until the nineteenth century. The division of a city by function — utilities and infrastructure below, and broad, airy boulevards and walkways for inhabitants above — can be seen in Ildefons Cerdà's celebrated expansion of Barcelona, laid out from 1860.
Today Feltrano's ideas are not merely sound; they mark out a path for urban planning to follow. Many specialists believe that the compact city — climbing upward rather than spreading horizontally, woven together with nature and above all with water, and easy to move around — could make modern cities greener and easier to live in. It is one more measure of how nearly Feltrano foresaw the concerns of present-day urbanism, and how far ahead of his own age he stood.
