Buildings that never were. The unbuilt projects for the Civic Hospital in Venice

“In the past two decades, new media and new technologies have challenged historians to rethink the ways that they research, write, present, and teach about the past” wrote Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rozenzweig in 2006 (Cohen and Rozenzweig 2006). Today, namely ten years after the publication of the book Digital History, no one can question the fact that computers and digital tools, which include graphic methods of knowledge production, provide historians with new possibilities not only for the dissemination of results, but also for research. IT tools for data managing and digital tools for visualization have in fact turned out to be extremely useful when dealing with particularly extended historical periods, or widespread urban portions, no-longer standing buildings, or projects which never saw the light, or if so just partially. The sequence of events surrounding the Civic Hospital in Venice between the end of the Republic in 1797 and the present day comprises all the above examples and for this reason the telling of its story turns out to be quite difficult if adopting the traditional research tools and methods. By focusing on the years between the two world wars, a very significant moment in the history of this institution, this paper aims at highlighting the results achieved thanks to the digital tools developed within the Visualizing Venice project in order to show how visualization, based on a thorough archival research, represents above all an intellectual process that has changed the character of the historical argument itself.