Heirs to a tradition of scholars and technicians who had been sent on mission under the Ancien Régime, the French Public Works Engineers (Ingénieurs des Ponts et Chaussées) who were sent to Italy under the Empire on tours of inspection were faced with a context of political and military domination. They were part of a process of remodelling territorial space, where roads, canals, ports and drained marshes were to serve a strategy of control over the Mediterranean and resistance to the continental blockade. For all that, the missions of Prony and his colleagues Sganzin, Bruyère and Rolland seem to have involved less of a colonising and imperial dynamic than a will to work with the Frenchmen posted to the area, together with their Italian colleagues, in an enormous effort aimed at developing the territory. They based their endeavour on precise knowledge, negotiated thanks to the dialogue between experts, carefully recorded in a vast array of reports, correspondence and travel journals.