CHAPTER V

ITALIAN TOWN-PLANNING. THE ORIGINS


If Greek and Macedonian town-planning are fairly well known, the Roman
Empire offers a yet larger mass of certain facts, both in Italy and in
the provinces. The beginnings, naturally, are veiled in obscurity. We
can trace the system in full work at the outset of the Empire; we
cannot trace the steps by which it grew. Evidences of something that
resembles town-planning on a rectangular scheme can be noted in two or
three corners of early Italian history--first in the prehistoric
Bronze Age, then in a very much later Etruscan town, and thirdly on
one or two sites of middle Italy connected with the third or fourth
century B.C. These evidences are scanty and in part uncertain, and
their bearing on our problem is not always clear, but they claim a
place in an account of Italian town-planning. To them must be added,
fourthly, the important evidence which points to the use of a system
closely akin to town-planning in early Rome itself.


_The Terremare_ (fig. 11).

(i) We begin in the Bronze Age, somewhere between 1400 and 800 B.C.,
amidst the so-called Terremare. More than a hundred of these strange
settlements have been examined by Pigorini, Chierici, and other
competent Italians. Most of them occur in a well-defined district
between the Po and the Apennines, with Piacenza at its west end and
Bologna at its east end. Some have also been noted on the north bank
of the Po near Mantua, both east and west of the Mincio, and two or