Forte San Procolo

Forte San Procolo stands in the northern sector of Verona, right beside the right bank of the Adige, where a depression at the foot of the San Massimo ridge once gave attackers ground the artillery on the city walls could not reach. The Austrian military engineers answered that weak point with a fort built between 1840 and 1841 to a design by Major General Franz von Scholl, director of the imperial office of fortifications in Verona, and completed after his death by Major General Johann von Hlavaty. It belongs to the ring of advanced forts raised around the city between 1837 and 1843, when Verona was being turned into a stronghold at the heart of the Quadrilatero, the network of four fortified cities defending Lombardy-Venetia.

The fort itself is a large, asymmetric heptagon with a central square redoubt, two storeys high and ringed by its own rifle gallery. A dry moat and an outer embankment encircle the earthwork, and four casemated caponiers let riflemen fire along the length of the moat. Four casemated traverses divide the courtyard, each hiding its own powder magazine, and a drawbridge once carried men from the courtyard into the redoubt. In war the garrison numbered 230 infantrymen and 30 artillerymen, expandable to 438, backed by two 9.5-centimetre rifled muzzle-loading cannons and four magazines holding 1,790 kilograms of powder apiece.

What stays with you is the purpose behind the geometry: the heptagonal rampart was shaped so its guns could fire in every direction across the horizon, erasing the tactical disadvantage that the low ground had handed to any enemy. It marks the shift from the older bastioned fronts, whose walls still face it across the water, to the polygonal forts of the nineteenth century.