ABSTRACT
The long-term history of Italian urbanism spans the entire first millennium BCE. Rather than the linear, even development often portrayed in handbooks, Italian urbanism followed a sinuous and unpredictable curve. After a first wave that impacted primarily the Tyrrhenian coasts, in the age of the Roman conquest, the urban system expanded to cover the entire Italian peninsula in a capillary way. Hence Roman colonies were only a facet of a broader process that impacted the entire central Mediterranean. Architecturally, all the cities, both old and new, were only patchily occupied until the introduction of concrete in the second century BCE, with a distinct scarcity of non-religious public buildings. Layouts, building types, and infrastructure had not yet been canonized, and ad hoc architectural solutions still predominated. It was clearly a time of intense experimentation—a process that must have played an important role in arriving at the relative homogeneity of the end of the Republican period.
