The first fully planned ideal city of the Renaissance: an eight-pointed star of walls inside a round moat, sixteen straight streets from a central piazza, the cathedral and the prince’s palace facing each other across the square, and a ring of parish and market squares.
Antonio Averlino, called Filarete, wrote his treatise for Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, as a dialogue in which an architect designs a whole city for his prince. He named it Sforzinda. Its plan is two squares turned 45° to make an eight-pointed star, set inside a circular moat, with towers at the points and gates in the angles between them. From each gate and each tower a straight street runs to the centre, sixteen in all, and a ring of squares partway along them gives every quarter a parish church or a market.
At the centre Filarete puts the great piazza, twice as long as broad. The cathedral, a centralised church under a dome with four corner towers, stands at the east end and the prince’s palace at the west, with the merchants’ square and the market square beside it. Round the piazza this town follows Alberti, whom Filarete had read: continuous porticoes a sixth of the square’s breadth high, a cathedral raised on a podium, and main streets lined with arcaded houses of one design. Alberti’s De re aedificatoria describes cities in general where Filarete draws one city in particular, and the two treatises are used together here.
The city is much reduced from Filarete’s, which would have been several kilometres across, but the centre is built to his dimensions. Click any building to see the rule that placed it.