ABSTRACT
Early modern streets have only recently emerged as a subject area for research; previously, discussions of streets have tended to be divided between the analysis of their built characteristics by architectural historians, and the life occurring on and around them by predominantly social or urban historians. A parallel strand to the street-scale renewal campaigns can be seen in the proliferation of ‘ideal city’ literature, which largely took the form of manuscript treatises for circulation among ruling elites and were sometimes published for a wider audience, including those in the fifteenth century of Leon Battista Alberti, Antonio Averlino and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, among others. HGIS evidently offers a valuable means of combining sources in such a way that privileges a spatial focus, although it is also clear that as an established methodology it tends to conform to a series of tropes through how the medium (map) shapes the message.
