Historical Library

Geographical and topographical maps

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Within the group of collected maps, a series, rather abundant, of historical significance and largely without particular publishing merits, essentially concerns the interests of study and documentation of the Province of Turin, in particular in the road sector, in that of the regulatory plans (a copy of the 1906 Turin expansion plan is preserved); other maps are linked to the numerous studies on the waterways and on the Piedmontese and Po waterways, with documentation on similar European trials.

The debate on whether or not to make navigable and therefore commercially usable waterways at constant speed was a topic of discussion characteristic of the Provinces of Northern Italy, especially in the first half of the last century, and particularly interested in Piedmont, where they had to make realistic this hypothesis of working personalities such as Senator Anselmi himself.
More reasonably, the Province invested in the development of the roads under its responsibility and was engaged in discussions and projects relating to the expansion, first, of the railway network, later, of the road and motorway network. This fund of technical cartography testifies in small part, and in a non-systematic way, these commitments. It comes from the deposits in the library at the time of the installation of the same, and does not belong to the archival material of the Province, pertaining to the Historical Archives of the same. It is recent the acquisition of some remarkable papers, in particular that of Vincenzo Maria Coronelli on the Waldensian Valleys (1694-97) and that of the "Principauté de Piemont" of Nicolas Fer (1705), along with others of the same Fer.