The defensive system of Pola and the Southern Istria consists of about thirty fortifications built during the XIX century by the Habsburg Empire, to realize and protect the arsenal in those territories. The research aims to outline the historical reasons and the constructive motivations of these fortresses
characterized by different types of geometric plan -Polesana tower, segmented Polesana tower and polygonal fortress Feldwerk- with their own constructive logic, functions, and inner distribution. Many of these, following the directives of the general urban plan of Pula of 1966, were destroyed, or abandoned. This is due to the logic of the damnatio Memoriae that involves several buildings built before 1947. Fort Bourguignon and Fort San Giorgio, built around 1850 in Pola, are two circular fortifications made of Istrian stone with an inner courtyard, covered for camouflage reasons by ground and grass: a type of structures that quickly became obsolete due to the rapid development of military engineering. The study deals with these forts and deepens them through the informative modeling of the architecture based on archival materials and surveys, to obtain a graphic restitution and to integrate the photographic documentation. The aim is also to enhance these buildings not protected by safeguard policies, to disseminate their history through the new technologies such as rapid prototyping and virtual reality.
