The Origin and Plan of Roman Florence

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Roman Studies.There has been much argument and little agreement about the date of the foundation of Florentia, about the purpose of its foundation with regard to Faesulae, and about the relation of the city's site and orientation to the Consular road which joined Arretium and Luca, the Via Cassia, and to the crossing of the River Arnus by the Roman equivalent of Ponte Vecchio. Although the Via Cassia is agreed to belong to the second century B.C., its precise date is uncertain, and for the stretch from Arretium to Faesulae and Florentia two different routes are recorded, one on the north bank (after the first few miles out of Arretium) and the other on the south as far as Ponte Vecchio. It is agreed that the southern route is later, but not whether it and the crossing of the Arno is a cause or a consequence of the foundation of Florentia.In face of the dogmatism of some and the scepticism of others 1 it may be worth while to review the evidence in the light of two fairly recent contributions to the question, the Dane Johan Plesner's work on the roads in the region of Florence,2 and Guglielmo Maetzke's discovery of a sixth-century circuit of walls within those of the Roman city.3 Plesner's article was published in I938, but has attracted little attention.4The upshot will indicate how much work remains to be done rather than arrive at more than tentative hypotheses. I shall argue (i) that the Via Cassia (Vetus), to be dated to I71 B.C., ran on the right bank of the Arnus to Faesulae and thence to Luca, winding along the foothills well above the swampy plains except where rivers had to be crossed; (2) that Florentia was in no way a product of the Cassia, though it was of course at once linked with it; (3) that Florentia could not have been planted so near to Faesulae unless it exploited quite new territory, namely the plain, hitherto swampy, now drained and centuriated: the drainage may have been projected by Julius Caesar, but the colony was perhaps planted by Octavian as triumvir in 4I B.C. thus centuriation and city are contemporary, although they are differently orientated; (4) that Florentia was a regular rectangle in shape, except that its SE. corner was cut off across two insulae because the land fell away there, and possibly its NW. 1 See Guglielmo Maetzke, Florentia (Rome: Istituto di studi romani, I94I, in Italia Romana: municipi e colonie, series I, vol. 5, pp. ioo with maps, plans and I5 plates; Mario Lopes Pegna, Firenze dalle origini al medievo (Florence: Del Re, I962), pp. 432; both works with extensive bibliographies. For scepticism, see En...

The Orientation of Roman Camps and Forts

“…This practice appears to have been a feature of centuriation (Ferrar and Richardson 2003). A practical reason for aligning cadasters on agricultural land on the cardinal points was perhaps to give all the occupants an equal share of sun and shade, but at Florence, though the cardo and decumanus of the city lay on the cardinal points, the centuriation was offset by 31° ( Atan 3/5) to suit the land relief and the natural drainage (Hardie 1965). So though the motive was strictly practical, the choice of the alignment was apparently influenced by its geometric relation to the sun's passage across the heavens.…”