ii.

It is worth noting, in this connexion, that when chess-board planning came into common use in the Roman Empire, many—perhaps most—of the towns to which it was applied were 'coloniae' manned by time-expired soldiers. Here is a rectangular scheme of streets, though the outline of the whole town is necessarily not rectangular (fig. City planning was based upon the inhabitants and the terrain Blocks of housing surrounded the agora. We find a large district extending to both banks of the Euphrates, which is covered rather irregularly by the mounds of many ruined buildings. Other narrower streets, generally about 10 ft. wide, ran at right angles up the slopes, with steps like those of the older Scarborough or of Assisi. A colonnaded highway ran straight through from north to south; two other streets crossed at right angles, and its chief public buildings, the Temple of the Sun and three other temples, two theatres and two public baths, stood near these three streets (fig.

The germ of Greek town-planning came from the east. Their problems are quite unlike those of the ancients.

The opposite of this has occurred at Calleva; here the rural house has been used, with scarcely a change, to form a town. Very likely the step was taken in the same period as at Silchester, that is, in the last thirty years of the first century. [53] The Roman camp, for example, had reached its complex form long before the middle of the second century, when Polybius described it in words. That has not always happened. Indeed, the south gate seems to have had five house-blocks west of it and four east of it, while the Porta Palatina stands further west, with six blocks on the west side of it.

Unfortunately, however, little is known of the buildings, and it is difficult to judge of the actual character of the place.

These blocks differ somewhat in shape from those of Priene, which are more nearly square; whether they differ in date is more doubtful. Grover, Brit. It looked on town-planning as one of those new methods of social reform, which stand in somewhat sharp contrast with the usual aims of political parties and parliaments.

Plainly, therefore, it had a definite and rectangular street-planning, though the brevity of the historian does not enable us to decide how many house-blocks it had and how far the lesser streets were symmetrical with these seven principal thoroughfares. 36. It was the only town of Roman municipal plan in Britain which was swept by Atlantic breezes.

ITALIAN TOWN-PLANNING.

But a body of evidence already waits to be used, and though its discussion may lead—as it has led me—into topographical minutiae, where completeness and certainty are too often unattainable and errors are fatally easy, my results may nevertheless contain some new suggestions and may help some future workers. These new towns did not, as a rule, enjoy the full Roman municipal status; northern Gaul was not quite ripe for that. Perhaps copying Roman originals seen in northern Italy, Frederic Stupor Mundi now built on a chess-board pattern the Terra Nova which he founded in Sicily. Hardy's Roman Laws and Charters, p. In length or in breadth or in both, they usually approximate to 120 ft. or some multiple of that. 33. 5), where some blocks are rather more square or oblong than others, but where all approach the same norm. In the centre was the Agora or market-place, with a temple and other large buildings facing on to it; round them were other public buildings and some eighty blocks of private houses, each block measuring on an average 40 x 50 yds.

At Silchester, official influence seems also to have been at work, and it is not impossible that the fourth case, Caerwent, may be explained by the same cause. high. It may not have looked so predominant to their builders and inhabitants. Two sites in it are especially notable. The whole town must have been 40 or 45 rather than 25 acres in area. But that age had scant sympathy for such a movement, and its beginnings were crude and narrow. Even in the west, the rule of the chess-board was sometimes broken. On the west, and still more on the east and south-east of the town, much of the area was not touched by the drainage works and therefore went unexplored. 33. At Castellazzo di Fontanellato, a little west of Parma, are the vestiges of a settlement which, with its defences, covered an area of about forty-three acres.