Ljubljana

Giovanni Pieroni (1586-1654), a Florentine by birth, was a military engineer and architect in Vienna. He received his doctorate at only twenty two years of age, at Pisa in civil and ecclesiastic law, but later devoted himself to natural sciences, mainly astronomy and astrology. He was a friend of Kepler and Galileo. While observing the fixed stars together with Francesco Rinuccini, he found evidence to support the Copernican heliocentric system. Pieroni came to Vienna in 1622 with the Medici gifts on the occasion of the wedding of Ferdinand Habsburg to Eleonora Gonzaga and designed the scenography for their wedding. He was appointed imperial supervisor of fortifications in the same year and came to Carniola, Gorizia and Croatia in that capacity in the 1630s. He made sketches of each place of major importance from the defence point of view: a veduta, the layout of fortifications, the town plan. He also assessed the defence capacity of each town and made proposals for its improvement. In Ljubljana, he carefully examined the castle and decided that it was entirely inadequate for defence, since it had only one defence tower and the walls did not provide protection against cannon. He believed that the cheapest solution would be to fortify the upper part of the castle hill and build a walled square between the castle and the city gates, which would link the two parts. Ljubljana, as shown in Pieroni’s veduta, is still a small town, squeezed between the river and the castle hill. The Augustine church can be seen in the lower left and the old Gothic Church of St Nicholas on the other bank of the Ljubljanica.