Abstract: Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, based on his own critical observation of ancient and modern constructions, is one of those treatises that allows one to verify how much these works have influenced architectural practice. In Rome, the treatise promoted the spread of dressed stone masonry, mortar vaults, and careful brickwork and facing. By contrast, Alberti’s architecture in Mantua demonstrates how the availability of materials or of specific expertise affected the transfer of techniques from one place to another.
