ABSTRACT
After the beginnings of European urbanization in the Aegean, it took several more centuries of the diffusion of technologies, the movement of peoples and the extension of trade before cities grew up in the central Mediterranean region. Metallurgy, one of the main technological conditions for V. Gordon Childe’s Urban Revolution, was probably introduced into the Italian peninsula in the second millennium, by migrants from the north. These included the Latins, on whose territory (Latium) south of the River Tiber Rome grew up. Some archaeologists put the beginnings of Italian urbanization as early as the end of the second millennium, during the Bronze Age; they believe that the features known as the Terremare – mounds of earth in the Po Valley – are the remains of planned cities (Holloway, 1994, p. 14). A more lasting process of urbanization set in during Italy’s Iron Age, partly stimulated by contact with the East. Among the first trading colonies in Italy were those founded during the eighth century BCE by Phoenician traders in western Sicily, and by Greek settlers in eastern Sicily and southern Italy. The first Greek trading post in the region was probably at Pithekoussai, on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, giving these western Greeks access to the metal ores of Etruria, to the north of the Tiber. But urbanization in the region cannot be reduced to a process of diffusion from the East. The Etruscans, a people whose language was unrelated to the Indo-European family, had their own traditions of city-building, and exerted a strong cultural influence on the Latins. In the ninth century, before any contact with Eastern traders, the populations of both Latin and Etruscan settlements were becoming more concentrated. By the seventh and sixth centuries, cities were emerging throughout central and southern Italy. These included Rome (see Figure 3.1 overleaf). Roman Italy https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203984376/4f208d80-5c23-4999-9a8d-99bed47a9492/content/fig3_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
