Giuseppe Simelli e la sua dissertazione sull’utilità di una scuola di disegno nelle città secondarie (1813)

In 1813 Giuseppe Simelli leads a scholarly dissertation in the Academy of the Ardenti of Viterbo, in which expresses the centrality of the drawing in knowledge and representation of the town and of the territory. Already in 1810, he had emphasized the role of drawing in training and profession in his Nozioni di prospettiva pratica. In this lesson - permeated by the French presence and culture in Italy - he marks the importance of a school of drawing to improve: capacity of 'civilization', positive influences on quality of urban decoration and territory, on organization of the countryside, fields, roads and buildings. Simelli takes the audience in an imaginary return from a long journey: a description of an utopia, of ideal and concrete images where he links the predilection for the neoclassical order to a taste for picturesque and romantic rural landscape