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Updated: May 1, 2025
But, as a rule, the streets ran parallel or at right angles to each other and the blocks of houses which they enclosed were either square or oblong. Much variety is noticeable, however, in details. Sometimes the outline of the ancient town was square or almost square, the house-blocks were of the same shape, and the plan of the town was indistinguishable from a chess-board.
The Merkes excavations occasionally show streets meeting at right angles and at least one roughly rectangular insula, of 150 x 333 ft. But the adjoining house-blocks agree neither in size nor shape, and no hint seems to have yet come to light of a true chess-board pattern. Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 42, Dec. 1909, pp. 7, 19; 44, Dec. 1910, p. 26.
In that a broad colonnaded main street ran from north-west to south-east; on the north-east side of this street stood a row of house-blocks with a structure taken to be a Basilica, and on the south-west of it were ten house-blocks, one of which includes some public baths. Campanien, pp. 215 foll.; Nissen, Ital.
This was a rectangular pattern of oblong house-blocks, measuring 54 x 89 yds., or in some cases a little more, and divided by streets varying from 15 to 30 ft. in width which ran at right angles or parallel to one another. Only a part of the town has been as yet unearthed.
Archaeologia, liii. 236 and lvi. 371. The plan given by Mr. Fox in liii. 236 represents his own theory, which may be open to doubt. Probably the other four municipalities in Britain were planned similarly, though the evidence is too slender to prove it. Albans, a local archaeologist long ago claimed to detect a scheme of symmetrical house-blocks, resembling squares very slightly askew.
There is unquestionably much Roman work in Miletus; there seems, however, no sufficient reason for ascribing the house-blocks shown on fig. 7 to any date but some part of the Macedonian period. Though differently shaped, they do not differ very greatly in actual area from those of Priene. They are somewhat smaller, but only by about 60 sq. yds. in each average-sized plot.
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.
Or, instead of squares, oblong house-blocks formed a pattern not strictly that of a chess-board but geometrical and rectangular. Often the outline of the town was irregular and merely convenient, but the streets still kept, so far as they could, to a rectangular plan.
A more definite, more symmetrical, often more rigidly 'chess-board' pattern was introduced for the towns which now began to be founded in many countries round and east of the Aegean. Ornamental edifices and broad streets were still indeed included, but in the house-blocks round them due space and place were left for the dwellings of common men.
Nearly all modern Turin has been laid out, bit by bit, in imitation and continuation of the original Roman lines. An insula is mentioned in Notizie, 1901, p. 391, which measured 74 x 80 metres. It is likely that there were small unevennesses in the ancient as there are in the modern house-blocks.
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