The Teaching of Mathematics in the Italian Artillery Schools in the Eighteenth Century

The artillery schools were established in concomitance with the European wars which followed each other in the first six decades of the XVIII century. In most European states, this period of conflicts corresponded with greater interest in the training of troops and, in particular, with new attention placed on the training of officers of the so-called “armi dotte”. Developments and improvements in military technology derived from the need to form new cadres who were able both to exploit the morphological features of the landscape through a knowledge of topography and plan works of fortification and make best use of artillery. In order to acquire this knowledge a thorough grounding in mathematics was required. Three important Italian military schools were established in this period: in the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Regie Scuole teoriche e pratiche di Artiglieria e Fortificazione of Turin (1739), in the Kingdom of Naples, the Real Accademia or Scuola Matematica (1745) and, in the Republic of Venice, the Militar Collegio of Verona (1759). The management of the military schools was entrusted to engineers and mathematicians: Ignazio Bertola and Alessandro Papacino D’Antoni in Turin, Nicola De Martino and Vito Caravelli in Naples, Anton Maria Lorgna and Leonardo Salimbeni in Verona.