Signs and ticknesses of the city. The role of pre-modern cartography

The cartographic documents are useful for the study of the city for the recognition of the long-lasting structures of the territory, containing all the invariants represented by the values, pre-existences, permanences and sediments, identifying the Loi de la persinstance du plan of Lavedan memory, as well as a precious treasure chest that also informs us about the role that the city has assumed over time. After a season entirely dedicated to growth, today there is greater attention to the existing city; there is talk of requalification, recovery, the need for an expansion limit. The territory in that “past growing season” was considered a mere support, container of activities, an unlimited resource. Not as a stratification over time of facts and culture, a space of relationships, a precious, limited and non-reproducible asset. In this new way of understanding the city and the territory, the tools of knowing have also changed, and the cartography, even the historical one, in this case becomes again a “speaking” document, once again assuming that importance in the interpretation of the urban fact, once to recognize and restore quality and identity to places. The contribution aims to report the evolution of the representation of the city and the territory, indicating the signs and thicknesses of the pre-modern cartography in order to recognize urban transformations.