Venetian defence in the Mediterranean: Nicosia’s city walls, Cyprus (1567-1570)

According to the developing defence techniques, the Venetian re-designed Nicosia walls in the Xvi cent. to protect the city from the Ottoman attacks. The Italian engineers Francesco Barbaro and Giulio Savorgnan conceived the new fortifications dismantling the older ones and reusing the stones of many other buildings. The plan has a stellar shape with eleven bastions, hendecagonal, so to have the Cathedral of S. Sofia in the middle, as in the ideal city of Renaissance times. The upper half of the wall section slopes like a pyramid, a shape more suitable for the protection from artillery. The walls were built from 1567 to 1570, surrounded by a deep ditch, about 80 mt. wide, supplied with the water of the river Pedeios, deviated from its course across the city. During the IV Ottoman-Venetian war (1570-1573) the city was seized and catpured by the Ottomans. The paper analyses the phases of the Venetian walls, considering the traces of the previous ones, by comparing them with other coeval poligonal forticiations, and with the indications provided by the treatises of architecture of the XVI century.