Paper Towns. Uses of Urban Space and Religious Architecture in Late Venetian Candia

Studies on the town of Candia must deal with the fragmentary state of sources and with the fact that the Venetian built heritage has been heavily modified or has disappeared. The paper deals with the urban space in Candia in the late Venetian period, a short time before the Ottoman conquest, by investigating some unpublished catastici (16th-17th century) compared to historiography and historical iconography. The cataloguing of urban place names was followed by their mapping. On the one hand, the types of properties, the mentioned religious buildings and their position were examined - some known attribution hypotheses were confirmed, and new ones were proposed - and, on the other hand, some aspects of the subdivision and use of space were considered: the places involved in the transfer procedures, the organization into contrade/parochie and the analysis of some areas with a specific use. The structure of the catastici allows to map not the exact position of estates, but the macro-areas in which they were: it is therefore possible to reconstruct a partial geography of the real estate market in Candia, identifying the areas most involved in changes of ownership, and adding new tools to understand the town as a spatial, social, economic, political, and building process.

Keywords: Venetian Candia, Cadasters, Maps, Religious Architecture, Urban Space, Real Estates.

Emma Maglio, Città di carta. Usi dello spazio urbano e architettura religiosa a Candia nel tardo periodo veneziano in "STORIA URBANA " 171/2022, pp 35-55, DOI: 10.3280/SU2022-171002