City Guides and Urban Identities in Early Modern Italy and the Low Countries

As of the early sixteenth century, city guides have become a major instrument in the process of forging urban identities in Western Europe. While offering precious documentary information, particularly appreciated and traditionally studied mostly by art historians, these guides typically are grounded in a desire fostered by individuals, interest groups or civic authorities to offer interpretations of urban identities projected both inwards and outwards, to the cities populace or to its visitors. This special issue of Incontri seeks to explore and analyse the ideological and strategic motivations underlying early modern city guides, while at the same time appreciating the documentary richness of these texts. In doing so, it intends to contribute to the remarkable rise in scholarly interest in this particular genre of texts, as exhibited by the recent explosion of (digital) editions of such guidebooks, as well as by a renewed academic attention to the phenomenon of early modern travel and its tools. To accomplish this, we focus on the two geographical regions that in early modern Europe offer the richest evidence of city guides Italy and the Low Countries and intend to gain better insight in the genre by juxtaposing these realities. While the publication of chorographic texts guidebooks, urban histories certainly was not limited to these geographical areas alone (the first guides to Lyon and Paris were produced around 1530, and Stow’s pioneering Survay of London came out in 1598), in early modern Italy and the Low Countries we find a production that quickly rises to intensities not surpassed anywhere else in Europe. Starting with


Harald Hendrix
As of the early sixteenth century, city guides have become a major instrument in the process of forging urban identities in Western Europe.While offering precious documentary information, particularly appreciated and traditionally studied mostly by art historians, these guides typically are grounded in a desire fostered by individuals, interest groups or civic authorities to offer interpretations of urban identities projected both inwards and outwards, to the cities populace or to its visitors.This special issue of Incontri seeks to explore and analyse the ideological and strategic motivations underlying early modern city guides, while at the same time appreciating the documentary richness of these texts.In doing so, it intends to contribute to the remarkable rise in scholarly interest in this particular genre of texts, as exhibited by the recent explosion of (digital) editions of such guidebooks, as well as by a renewed academic attention to the phenomenon of early modern travel and its tools.To accomplish this, we focus on the two geographical regions that in early modern Europe offer the richest evidence of city guides Italy and the Low Countries and intend to gain better insight in the genre by juxtaposing these realities. 1hile the publication of chorographic texts guidebooks, urban histories certainly was not limited to these geographical areas alone (the first guides to Lyon and Paris were produced around 1530, 2 and Stow's pioneering Survay of London came out in 1598), 3 in early modern Italy and the Low Countries we find a production that quickly rises to intensities not surpassed anywhere else in Europe.Starting with

City guides in early modern Italy
In Italy this would produce a myriad of guidebooks of both major and minor urban locations, and of the country as a whole in a way that reflects it clearly as a collection of cities, as is apparent from Leandro Alberti's seminal Descrittione di tutta Italia, published in 1550 but based on extensive explorations undertaken during the 1520s and 1530s. 6While re-interpreting the model offered a century before in Flavio Biondo's Italia illustrata, 7 at the date of publication Alberti's project was the only one of its kind.Apart from Albertini's guides to the art treasures in Florence and Rome, the 1510s already had seen the publication of a sophisticated guidebook to the small town of Nola, Ambrogio De Leone's De Nola [Fig.1]. 8 Other cities that could boast illustrious antique heritage soon were to follow, like Verona (1540) and Padua (1560). 9Most chorographic efforts however were dedicated to Naples and Rome, the two capital cities not only rich with antiquity but which also offered highly attractive elements such as Rome's holy places and Naples' natural setting replete with unusual geological properties.
A distinguishing feature of the impressive chorographic production that focussed on these two capitals is in fact its binary approach, describing the Antique and Modern, the Holy and Profane, the Natural wonders and the man-made Art all at once.This dualistic appreciation is seen as a precious and distinct asset as well as a motive for interpreting these texts as offering conflicting views on the cities, which is a feature assessed in detail by a longstanding but also recent tradition of scholarship. 10What likewise becomes evident while considering this production in its parallel evolution is that in both cities one can witness, over the course of the sixteenth century, various shifts testifying the genre's evolution into an attractive commercial product.The switching from Latin to Italian, in order to attract more than just a learned audience, and then again from Italian to Latin, in order to appeal to an international public, is just one of the many adaptations, alongside the introduction of visual illustrations and the switch to handy pocket formats (from folio and 4° to 8°, 12° and even 24°), that illustrate how chorographic texts become part and parcel of the increasing mobility pervading early modern Europe.This then easily explains why from the mid-sixteenth century on Italian publishers begin to rush into this promising market, producing guides to all kinds of cities, even those that could not boast the prestige of a clearly traceable antique heritage. 11And so Florence and Venice could start to compete with Rome and Naples thanks to Sansovino's Venetia città nobilissima (1581) and Bocchi's Le bellezze della città di Fiorenza (1591). 12The guidebooks of Florence and Venice were soon followed in the seventeenth century by dozens of those of other cities on the peninsula, from Bologna to Messina and from Rimini to Vicenza. 13

City guides in the early modern Low Countries
A remarkably parallel phenomenon then develops in the Low Countries, almost exactly a century later. 14The starting point here also is a pioneering and yet highly authoritative enterprise dedicated to the whole region viewed as a sequel of flourishing urban realities, Lodovico Guicciardini's seminal Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, first published in 1567 and soon presented in various languages, from French (1567) and German (1580), to Dutch (1612) [Fig.2] and Latin (1613). 15irante e.a.(eds), Napoli, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1995, which lists 9 works for the 16th century, and 9 works for the 17th century.Digital (critical) editions of the Neapolitan guidebooks are currently being prepared in the framework of the 'Memofonte' project in Pisa (www.memofonte.it), in the project 'Codex.Biblioteche Digitali della Campania' (www.codexcampania.it),as well as in the project on 'Il viaggio a Napoli tra XVI e XIX secolo' fostered by the University of Naples. 11On this process, see Siekiera, 'Delineare', cit., part.pp.160-161.She recalls the case of the Venetian printer Michele Tramezzino who as of 1542 started to produce Italian versions of Flavio Biondo's chorographies, then printed a guide to the Roman antiquities compiled by his collaborator Lucio Fauno, first in Italian (1548) and later in Latin (1552).Lucio Fauno alias Giovanni Tarcagnota would continue this work by publishing some 15 years later in Naples his seminal Del sito et lodi della città di Napoli, Napoli, Scotto, 1566. 12F. Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima et singolare descritta in XIII libri, Venezia, Sansovino, 1581, available in a facsimile reprint prefaced by A. Prosperi, Bergamo, Leading Edizioni, 2002; F. Bocchi, Le bellezze della città di Fiorenza, Firenze, [Sermartelli],1591.A digital version of Bocchi's guide is available in the online Memofonte database (cfr.note 10), alongside other guidebooks to Florence.The database contains also materials on l'Aquila, Pisa, Siena and Turin, alongside the Neapolitan guides quoted before (n.10).To my knowledge, no (critical) digital editions of Venetian guides are available. 13A classical survey of Italian chorographies is the chapter on 'Die italienische Ortsliteratur' in J. von Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur, Wien, Schroll, 1924, pp.463-530.Some of these guidebooks have been recently republished, like Marco Boschini's 1676 guide to Vicenza, now available in the critical edition by Waldemar de Boer: M. Boschini, I Gioielli Pittoreschi virtuosi ornamenti della città di Vicenza, Firenze, Centro Di, 2008. 14An isolated though significant case is the earliest, yet unpublished chorography produced in the Low Countries dedicated to the city of Maastricht, Matthaeus Herbenus' Libellus de Trajecto instaurato, written in 1485, a work clearly following Flavio Biondo's prototype on Roma instaurata published a decade earlier.See now M. Herbenus, Over hersteld Maastricht (De Trajecto instaurato), transl.M. van Heyst, Roermond, 1985.For further references, cfr.Verbaan, De woonplaats, cit., p. 60, n. 54. 15 L. Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, Anversa, Guglielmo Silvio, 1567.A critical edition is available in idem, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, ed.D. Aristodemo, PhD dissertation University of Amsterdam, 1994.For the huge bibliography on Guicciardini's enterprise and its enduring success, see also H. van der Heijden, K. Oomen, De 'Beschrijving van de Nederlanden' door Lodovico Guicciardini in het kader van zijn tijd, Alphen aan den Rijn, 2001, and the recent overview in Verbaan, De woonplaats, cit., p. 60, n. 53.
Firmly grounded in Italian prototypes, notably Alberti's recent chorography of the peninsula, Guicciardini's book, and particularly its monumental description of Antwerp, would satisfy the market for decades.But with the waning of hostilities between the rebellious northern Low Countries and the Spanish monarchs in the wake of the 1609 truce, and with the parallel political, economical and demographical rise of many urban centres in the North, as of the 1610s an ever growing production of chorographies dedicated to single cities starts. 16nitially here we can observe the same oscillation between the use of Latin and the vernacular, which is a situation that persists until the 1640s particularly in the chorographies dedicated to Amsterdam and Haarlem, from the pioneering 1611 Rerum urbis Amstelodamensium historia by Pontanus, published three years later in a Dutch version, 17 until the 1647 book by Schrevelius on Haarlem, Harlemum, presented already the next year in its vernacular guise as Harlemias, ofte, om beter te seggen, de eerste stichtinghe des stadt Haerlem, het toe-nemen en vergrootinge der selfden. 18This clearly attests to a re-orientation from a specialist to a more general audience, as the parallel shift in the use of smaller book formats evidences: the Latin version of Pontanus' chorography is in the prestigious large folio format, whereas its vernacular counterpart is in 4°.This format would then dominate the Dutch chorographical production up to the 1650s, when books in a pocket format (12°) would begin to appear, starting with Les délices de la Hollande, published in 1651 by a teacher of French established at the University of Leiden, Jean Nicolas Parival, who with his guidebook successfully targeted an international audience. 19t is hardly a coincidence that Parival's cosmopolitan guidebook is published only a few years after the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia, and that the 1660s witness a true explosion of chorographic literature particularly focussed on the then booming city of Amsterdam.Starting with Fokkens' guidebook to the commercial metropolis, published in 1662 (with various reprints within 5 years), a whole series of Amsterdam chorographies followed, written by Dutch authors (Dapper 1663, Domselaer 1665) but also by foreigners (Von Zessen 1664, De Jolle 1666).The same decade also saw the production of guidebooks introducing to the cities of Dordrecht, Delft and The Hague, as well as to Louvain in the South. 20So at the end of the seventeenth century the Dutch urban landscape was equally well portrayed as its Italian counterpart had been a century earlier.Both regions would continue to attract chorographic endeavours also in the years to follow, well into the eighteenth century, in fact.

Evolutions in early modern chorography
In these projects the original impetus to accentuate a city's prestige by reconstructing its history and preferably stressing its links to antiquity gave way to a proud listing of recent and contemporary accomplishments, in politics, in the arts and letters, and in commerce.Sometimes this occurred in a context of patronage by civic or princely authorities, notably in the Southern Low Countries.Lipsius's description of Louvain (1605) was the product of a civic commission, 21 and the archdukes pursued an active policy in this regard, supporting an author like Jean Baptiste Gramaye in his writing of urban chorographies on Mechelen (1607), Antwerp (1610), and Geraardsbergen (1611). 22But also commercial motivations were at hand, as the numerous and competitive guides produced in the 1660s illustrate.
The already mentioned language shift (in the Netherlands' case from Latin to Dutch and then to other vernaculars, particularly French) alongside the use of smaller formats and illustrations, indicates that these chorographies became ever more used and interpreted as guidebooks for visitors.The readers might initially consist of locals interested in deepening their knowledge of their own civic culture and history, 23 as had been the case in many of the sixteenth-century Italian guidebooks, from Benedetto di Falco's Descrittione dei luoghi antiqui di Napoli (1548) to Antonfrancesco Doni's I Marmi (1552), featuring conversations centred on the Florentine (artistic) accomplishments. 24Such urban pride, though, could easily open up to include informing foreign visitors about the cities' attractions, particularly when visitors from abroad abounded.It is no surprise then that a university tutor as the already mentioned Parival addressed his Délices de la Hollande (1651) to his francophone students at Leiden: 'Ce traité voit le jour, pour l'amour de la patrie & pour le profit des estudiens'. 25Or that Giulio Cesare Capaccio entitled his 1634 guide to Naples Il Forastiero, framing his extensive chorography as a guided tour for a foreigner visiting the city. 26he early modern transformations of the art of chorography are in fact deeply intertwined with the rapidly increasing mobility characterising Europe from the midfifteenth century onwards.Whereas initially this mobility gave rise to guidebooks and other tools developed for specific categories of travellers pilgrims, merchants, students and scholars as of the late sixteenth century these instruments tend to fuse into new templates able to respond to more comprehensive categories of visitors.Next to the Mirabilia for Christians performing a pilgrimage to Rome, 27 to the Itinerarii and other practical manuals for merchants looking for business opportunities, 28 and to the apodemic instructions on the art of travelling that as of the 1570s were published to accompany well-to-do youngsters and their tutors on their peregrinatio accademica,29 new travel tools were developed that incorporated elements of all these traditions alongside with information taken from the rich chorographic literature now at hand.
Indicative of this shift is a book like the Itinerarii Italiae rerumque Romanarum libri tres, published in 1600 by the Antwerp based Frans Schott [Fig.3]. 30Though conceived as a product in the traditional pilgrimage cycle, in view of the 1600 Jubilee, it incorporates both practical and erudite materials, copying large parts of an earlier book reporting on the educational tour of the Italian peninsula undertaken by a German prince in the 1570s, Stephanus Pighius' Hercules Prodicius (1584), a work which in its turn was heavily informed by texts like Alberti's Descrittione.Precisely because of its composite nature, Schott's guidebook soon became a bestselling text, translated in various languages, supplemented by additional materials and illustrations, and thus running through some 30 editions in the next century and a half. 31Guidebooks like these, as they were produced somewhat later also for those touring the Low Countries, as Jan Ten Hoorn's 1679 Naeuw-keurig reysboeck bysonderlijk dienstig voor kooplieden, en reysende persoonen, catered for the rising market of well-informed travellers visiting various parts of Europe, for business, education or pleasure. 32s recent scholarship has established on the basis of the rich extant documentation at hand, and thus correcting a cliché still often repeated, these were not only wealthy aristocrats on a Grand Tour of Italy. 33The social extraction of early modern 'tourists' was more varied than traditionally presumed in the debate on the Grand Tour; the time spent on touring might also be rather limited, and the destinations were not only distant locations full of prestigious heritage. 34Short visits to not very far away cities, to locations attractive for their natural appeal or because of some fascinating event in distant or even recent history, were equally part and parcel of early modern mobility as elaborate princely tours, be they directed to a classical destination such as the Italian peninsula or to more contemporary ones as the Dutch Republic, visited even twice by someone like Cosimo III de' Medici in 1667 and 1669, and thus exactly during the period in which the production of guidebooks to Dutch cities was booming. 35* The interdependence of chorographic literature and the evolving travel culture of early modern Europe also inform the texts that follow.In the first essay presented here, Silvia Gaiga demonstrates the enduring international impact of the pioneering work by Leandro Alberti, well beyond intertextual suggestions in later guidebooks on Italian cities and the peninsula as a whole.The Descrittione di tutta Italia quickly found a highly interested audience all over Europe, as is evidenced by its early presence in most of the academic libraries in Northern Europe.Its chorographic descriptions also informed an entrepreneurial cartographer like Abraham Ortelius when he conceived his ambitious atlas in the 1570s, a product closely linked to the emerging market of books targeting the growing group of travellers.Gaiga demonstrates that Ortelius appreciated Alberti's suggestions particularly while addressing the erudite sections of this new audience.The versions of his atlas soon published in the vernacular, however, particularly in Dutch and German, include a radically different chorographic description of the Italian peninsula, produced by Ortelius personally and clearly directed at a kind of traveller interested in a more practical approach of his trip to Italy.
This category of travellers is equally targeted in the booklets discussed by José van der Helm, who also focusses on a case of intercultural contact between Italian and Netherlandish early modern travel culture.The composite nature of the two Dutch Delitiae presented here, on the peninsula as a whole (1602) and on Rome (1625), allows us to better understand the profile of such travellers with a paramount practical orientation.Precisely because the booklets incorporate various materials derived from existing travel tools, from the Itinerarii to the recent guidebook by Schott, they reveal a profoundly utilitarian background, as do the elaborate language instructions they contain.Concentrating on these rudimentary methods for Dutch travellers to learn Italian, Van der Helm demonstrates that these derive from an earlier Flemish prototype, developed as of the 1520s.This produces guidebooks that from a chorographical viewpoint are quite curious, since they give information more pertinent to the situation in the Low Countries than in Italy.But this also gives us a rather precise idea of how early modern travelling by merchants looked, since the dialogues used for language learning present numerous situations derived from a dayto-day practice, which is a reality where an Italian context apparently did not differ substantially from a Dutch one.
How strongly chorographical texts depend on intertextual borrowings from previous materials, up to the point of becoming a patchwork of quotations from earlier texts, is illustrated in the essay by Harald Hendrix, which highlights how this characteristic feature of chorography becomes the object of an unusually early debate on plagiarism.This polemic between two clearly competing Neapolitan intellectuals, Tomaso Costo and Scipione Mazzella, denotes how in the 1590s the status of chorography was changing considerably.Hendrix argues that the growing numbers of visitors to a city like Naples, particularly those coming from far away, lured publishers and authors alike as of the 1580s to transform conventional chorography conceived in a context of local pride into a commercially attractive product targeting this new audience.This went along with a re-framing of existing chorographical materials, not only causing concern with regard to its dubious status oscillating between intertextuality and plagiarism, but also in view of an urban identity no longer presented to well-informed citizens but now to foreign visitors that depend far more heavily on the accuracy and reliability of the given information.
What happens when an author adopts a particular viewpoint while presenting an urban landscape becomes clear from Enrico Parlato's discussion of the guidebooks to Rome produced by Fioravante Martinelli in the 1640s.These books, explicitly conceived to be used by well-informed foreigners visiting the Eternal City, privilege a perspective which contrary to most conventions frames the city's heritage in a dominantly Christian light, taking not its antique roots but Constantine's reign as its starting point.Given Martinelli's pivotal position in the city's contemporary cultural scene, as a friend of Borromini and being closely linked to the Catholic elite, his perspective reveals Parlato asserts the ambition to promote this circle's vision of Rome's contemporary identity in a chorographic context by targeting an international audience of intellectuals.This explains why these books adopt, on the one hand, an unusually small format and the template of realistic itineraries, while, on the other hand, they offer a most erudite introduction to the monuments to be seen.Since these include many of the fairly recent ambitious building projects by architects like Borromini himself, Martinelli's guide offers a state-of-the-art introduction to seventeenth-century Rome that because of its documentary value has never lost its appeal.
Guidebooks indeed keep fascinating us since they offer a combination of perspectives and documentary evidence that allows us a privileged insight into specific historical situations.Joris van Gastel demonstrates how precious such information still can be, focussing in his essay on the remarkable attention for material detail in a guidebook as Carlo Celano's Notitie del bello, dell'antico e del curioso della città di Napoli (1692).Celano systematically describes and appreciates the material qualities of the stones he encounters in his urban explorations.He admires the aesthetic aspect of the precious marbles as a distinct quality of Neapolitan heritage and identity, linked as it is to the city's geological peculiarities, but also as a mark of its populace's good taste.Paradoxically, however, Celano's praise of the city's stones is to be followed shortly by a movement to cover all surface in stucco.This would transform the urban landscape into something much more homogeneous, while losing many of the colours and varieties admired by Celano in the city's stones.Thus Celano's guidebook offers us, Van Gastel explains, a testimony of a particular aesthetic disposition as well as a document of a material situation on the verge of its disappearance.
In these same years, a similar situation of transition occurs in the southern Low Countries, following the devastating military campaigns by Louis XIV.Whereas until the late seventeenth century cities like Namur were hardly considered a worthwhile travel destination and had lacked any serious chorographic attention, at the turn of the eighteenth century this changed fundamentally.In his essay Gerrit Verhoeven shows how guidebooks like Jean-Baptiste II Christyn's Les Délices des Païs-Bas (1697) start to include extensive presentations of the hitherto unnoticed cities in the South-Eastern corner of the Low Countries, from Maastricht and Liège to Namur and Mons, highlighting those areas' recent military events.Focussing on the spots where this dramatic contemporary history still might be experienced fortresses, battlegrounds Christyn's guidebook managed to successfully brand the region as Europe's 'Theatre of Mars' and thus as an attractive tourist destination.Verhoeven demonstrates this success by showing how as of the publication of the Délices visitors started to flock to exactly those spots Christyn had evoked so imaginatively, often but not always the book itself at hand.He moreover evidences how influential this exercise in reframing the region would become, by tracing the textual reminiscences of the Délices and similar guides in travel accounts by visitors to these sites, and by showing how this approach engendered performances by local touristic guides who enacted scenes from his texts, bringing history to life.