La Carta idrografica d’Italia come fonte per la storia degli opifici idraulici alla fine dell’Ottocento. Il caso toscano

In all pre-industrial societies, water power has been the main form of energy used to drive grain and oil mills, ironworks, fulling mills, paper factories and other types of craft and manufacturing activities. The “Carta idrografica del Regno d’Italia”, published in the last decade of the 19th century, is the first representation at topographic scale of the hydrographic network and it is homogeneous at national level and includes the location of all the water-powered factories existing in Italy in the late 19th century. The graphical representation of the structures is supported by technical data such as type, nature of the diversion, flow rates, months of use, as well as by monographic studies on the hydrological characteristics and productive capacity of Italian watercourses. Using the methodologies of historical GIS, the paper aims to analyse the distribution of water-powered factories, existing at the end of the 19th century both in Tuscany as a whole and in two provinces (Pisa and Arezzo) chosen as case studies.