Imagining a City Gone and Past

The roads of the city dictated the traveler's experience and thereby what they took from Rome. Diane Favro's book 'Augustan Rome' has a chapter in which Favro created two fictional characters who were traveling through the city. Favro was focusing on the changes Augustus brought to the city which gives her focus a bias. In this section I have included a number of exerpts from her book that I feel capture what the city would have been like and how the roads shaped human perception of and experience within the city. Rome was a city of spectacle and her roads were active in creating and enhancing the city's affect.

"On this brisk fall day in AD 14, the grandfather moves slowly with his granddaughter toward the center of Rome. Wistfully, the old man recalls a walk taken with his own father over 60 years earlier. Much has changed. Than Rome was a jumbled, illegible, inimagineable Republican city. With pride the elderly patrician notes that few cities can now compare with the impressive capital on the Tiber." (p. 255 Favro)

"Shortly before crossing the Tiber River, several large highways converge. First, the Via Tiberina joins the Via Flaminia from the east; a bit southwest, the Via Claudie also joins the Flaminian highway." "Movement slows as traffic increases. The observers pass numerous wagons leaving Rome after making deliveries at night, the only time wheeled traffic is allowed in the city without special permission." "To double their pay load, carts exit fillled with rubbish and human waste, the most prolific products manufactured in the capital." "In the distance the travelers already can see a brown haze marking the site of Rome, where countless cooking fires and large industrial furnaces create a smokey nimbus." (p.225)

*Plan of Rome (p.68-9 Chevallier)*

"In 20 BC, Augustus himself assumed responsibility as curator viarum for all the viae leading into Rome." (for more on Political Infrastructure ) "Along the broad expanse of the Via Flaminia, the travelers pass numerous tombs dating back to the early Republican period ... most of these tombs show evidence of great expenditure and care." (p.258)

"Ram-rod straight and raised above the plain, the Via Flaminia shapes the experience of all travelers ... In effect, the highway acts as a viewing platform organizing the urban experience. As they move along the broad, straight line of the Via Flaminia, observers see select buildings in a prescribed sequence." (p.260)

"Peering along the various side streets, the travelers catch glimses of festooned altars to the Lares Compitaler honoring the spirits of the cross-roads." (p. 270)

The Darker Dirtier Side

While Roman roads often enhanced the spectacle of the city as seen above, they were also dirty dangerous places where the careless could lose their purse or even their life. The streets were unlit, except when on certain festivals, some streets appear to have had temporary illumination (p. 71 Robinson). Dead animals were mentioned in a Papinian text as being something that needed to be cleared from the street. 'Dead animals' in this context were not butcher's carcasses but the bodies of overworked asses, run-over dogs, and mysteriously dead cats. The city was not kind to animals or people and all these rotting bodies would have littered the streets of the city (p.72 Robinson). Dependance on property owners to upkeep roads, during times of social unrest, the roads deteriorate. "Robbers haunt the narrow muddy streets; loiterers stand at every crossroads anxious to express their frustration (p. 29 Favro)." Although this description is specifically of the end of the Republic, it suits any time that the city was suffering a weakening of the central state.

*Reconstruction of a Roman city street (p. 16 Favro)*

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