ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a number of additional factors that potentially influenced personal decision-making in Northwest Italy, such as economic changes, municipalisation and the physical reorganisation of the landscape. It focuses on the impact of Roman imperialism and on the structures that Rome imposed both consciously and unconsciously on the people in Northwest Italy. Economic, fiscal, demographic and legal changes, urbanism and municipalisation must have had a potentially destructive effect on local people. Throughout history, empires manifest their presence through a landscape and architecture of power. The world around the indigenous social agent had been slowly but surely changing over the course of the late Republic. Colonisation, municipalisation and urbanism are overlapping issues since one cannot have one without the other in the Roman Empire. In the second century BC, we can see that multiple exogenous factors need not result in societal integration or cultural reorientation towards Rome, though societal change and new cultural media were developed.
