ABSTRACT
The long phase of Roman colonization in central Adriatic Italy, coinciding with the third and second centuries BCE, affords many different examples of cultural transmission and assimilation, alongside changing settlement patterns. This phase is marked by an impressive influx into the region of rural and urban colonists from other Italian regions and beyond, and by the introduction of urban ways of life heavily influenced by Rome and central Tyrrhenian Italy. But it is also in these still somewhat under-studied first two centuries of Roman dominance that a diversity of interesting agglomerations and urban forms was created, by a heterogeneous group of Indigenous populations and immigrants who integrated their new settlements into the gradually changing surrounding territories and landscapes between the central Apennine Mountains and the Adriatic Sea. Based on a recent analysis of urban developments in some 40 Roman towns of the region, as well as on intensive archaeological field surveys and observations in the centrally located valley of the Potenza River and in the wider area of northern Picenum, this chapter illustrates and characterizes the impact of colonization on the urban dynamics in the Adriatic area of central Italy.
