United States or Equatorial Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The two together furnish examples of the town-planning of middle Italy of about 400-300 B.C., in days that are only half historic, and thus help to fill the gap between the Terremare and the fully developed system of the Roman Imperial period. Livy ii. 34, contradicted, however, by xxvii. 10 and by Dionysius Halic. vii. 13 ad fin.
It will take worlds of time; it will take a multitude striving; it will take unnumbered forces education, health-work, eugenics, town-planning, the rise of women, philanthropy, law a thousand thousand dawning powers. Oh, we are only at the faint beginnings of things!" And he thought of the books he had read, and the theories of which he had been so sure.
Over the débris of Numantine liberty a little Roman town grew up. But it is hardly mentioned save in one or two road-books. Yet it enjoyed some form of municipal status and its streets and houses show to the excavator traces of Roman town-planning. The streets ran parallel or at right angles to one another; the house-blocks measured some 50 yds. square. Schulten, Abhandlungen der k.
The Company own twenty-seven square miles of land, which is none too little for a town that already has nearly 100,000 and may in the near future have a quarter of a million inhabitants. Fortunately the lie of the land, which is undulating and rises gradually from the level of the river beds, adapts itself both to aesthetic and sanitary town-planning.
Each road runs to a small gate in the brick river-wall: there are as many gates as lanes. The course of the river appears to have been straighter then than it is now. So far, in brief, Herodotus. Clearly his words suggest town-planning.
In the preceding chapters Roman town-planning has been treated in connexion with towns of definite municipal rank, which bore the titles 'colonia' or 'municipium'. The system is, of course, closely akin to such foundation or refoundation as the establishment of a 'colonia' implied in the early Empire, while the no less Roman character of the 'municipium' made town-planning appropriate to this class of town also.
But it seems reasonable to believe that a Graeco-Italian rectangular fashion of town-planning did supersede an earlier, irregular, Italian style, and had become supreme before the end of the Republic. Perhaps about 180 B.C., Mommsen, Roman Hist. iii. 206. Aquileia was set up in 181 B.C. to guard the north-east gate of Italy, and was reinforced in 169.
The common idea that the population of a town can be calculated by the number of seats in its theatre or amphitheatre is quite amiss. The beginnings of ideas and institutions are seldom well known or well recorded. They are necessarily insignificant and they win scant notice from contemporaries. Town-planning has fared like the rest.
But the towns of central Italy were in great part more ancient than the era of precise town-planning, and many of them were perched in true Italian fashion on lofty crags praeruptis oppida saxis which gave no room for square or oblong house-blocks.
Whenever ancient remains show a long straight line or several correctly drawn right angles, we may be sure that they date from a civilized age. In general, ancient town-planning used not merely the straight line and the right angle but the two together. It tried very few experiments involving other angles.
Word Of The Day