Naples Digital Archive: Moving Through Time and Space

Historical maps are excellent tools for understanding the shape and development of a city. This project combines for the first time geo-referenced historical maps of Naples with texts from city guidebooks. Digital layering creates a tool that allows the user to move virtually in time and space.
The focus is on a multi-layered digital map that represents the city at the time of the viceroys (1503–1734). The starting point is the rich pictorial and cartographic material that makes it possible to trace the historical development of Naples. The cornerstones are the maps by Lafréry 1566, Baratta 1629, Petrini 1748, Duca di Noja 1750–1775, Rizzi Zannoni 1790, Marchese 1804–1813, Schiavoni 1872–1880, and those of the cadaster of 1895–1905. The digital platform links the historical maps and images to a complex database that incorporates new archival documents. This enables the user to grasp the urban development of Naples from a new perspective. At the same time this analysis is used as a basis for a critical examination of historical representation methods and their digital processing. Graphic and textual data – in particular information from historical city guides – and links will be added to the digital format. These are to be combined with further (published and unpublished) materials, thus adding information about specific places and parts of buildings (such as family chapels) by inserting them directly into the hyper-map.
The selected area for the long-term study consists of the twelve districts of Naples that appear on maps from the period before the unification of Italy. From 2018–2020, the main focus was on developing an appropriate historical-critical method and on the technical implementation at the interface with the digital archive. The results are (a) the creation of the ‘mappa vicereale’; (b) the detailed exploration of two particularly significant areas in their entire diachronic span from Greek times to the 18th century, namely the insula of the cathedral and the area along the ancient Decumano maggiore (also known as Spaccanapoli).
The digital interface offers the opportunity to explore the city through the combination of maps and texts in layers of time, to penetrate the urban palimpsest, and to visualize the routes of guide literature. The tool complements the already available, annotated, and freely accessible maps and historical views made by Antoine Lafréry, Giovanni Carafa Duca di Noja, Alessandro Baratta, and Jan van Stinemolen.