Between utopia and reality: visions and pre-visions in Machinae Novae by Fausto Veranzio.

Fausto Veranzio (Faust Vrančić, 1551 - 1617) humanist, philosopher and Dalmatian historian, known for its Dictionarium Quinque Nobilissimarum Europae linguarum, Latinae, Italicae, Germanicae, Dalmaticae et Ungaricae (Venetiis, 1595) and Logica Nova (Venetiis, 1616) was, curiously, a forerunner of the Machine revolution, that will own the revolution of science and technical progress during the Industrial Revolution. Trained at the University of Padua also in mathematics, lover of science and the progress of mechanics and engineering, he publishes at the end of the sixteenth century a “visionary” treaty, where instead his visions will translate in actually built. His treatise on Machinae Novae (Venetiis, c. 1595 or 1616) is anticipating scientific and technological advances that will find fertile ground in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Veranzio design is not only imaginative illustration of a machine or a work of engineering, is rather precursor sign of a refined technology that will be developed in the following centuries. The suspension bridges imagined and designed by Veranzio are, for example, precognitions of an engineering that will be declined, with infinite facets of sign and design, with the introduction of cast iron, iron and steel in Architecture, almost two centuries after publication of his treatise. In this short note we will tell the traces, the visions and pre-visions of a Renaissance man who anticipates, with his ideas and his projects, the Iron architecture design and especially the suspension bridges.