From the Mountains to the Sea: The Roman Colonisation and Urbanisation of Central Adriatic Italy

From the Mountains to the Sea proposes an innovative synthesis of

recent archaeological research on town formation and urbanisation, and

connected Roman colonisation, of the central part of Adriatic Italy.

Frank Vermeulen analyses the formation and character of Roman towns in

this still somewhat understudied area of central Italy, thus

contributing to a better understanding of the lasting Roman impact on

conquered societies in Italy as a whole. During the past decade much

archaeological fieldwork has been conducted on urban sites in this area,

including exciting field surveys, and it is now high time for a

geographical and historical contextualisation of the more than 40 Roman

urban sites known in this area, based on a careful review of the

scholarly tradition and the bringing together of much new, often

unpublished or preliminary published, field data. The result is the

first comprehensive synthesis of the urban phenomenon in a region

characterized by one of the most dense town networks of the Roman

Empire. Some of the main sub-themes to discuss when dealing with

Roman-inspired urbanism are present in this book, including: town

formation, town planning, the structural relationship town-territory,

religious aspects and urban sanctuaries, public buildings (fora,

basilicae, baths, porticoes, theatres, amphitheatres,

macella, etc.) and domestic architecture. But beyond the mostly

archaeologically-driven investigation of architectural features of the

colonies and all other towns in the study region, there is an attempt to

understand the disposition and functioning of all the individual town

centres in their wider context of territory, region and state. An

additional important feature of the book is the gazetteer of urban sites

which forms a starting point for all those working in Roman Italy.