The Fortifications of Pompeii and Ancient Italy

The Fortifications of Pompeii and Ancient Italy PDF Author: Ivo Van der Graaff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429868405
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The fortifications of Pompeii stand as the ancient city’s largest, oldest, and best preserved public monument. Over its 700-year history, Pompeii invested significant amounts of money, resources, and labor into re-building, maintaining, and upgrading the walls. Each intervention on the fortifications marked a pivotal event of social and political change, signalling dramatic shifts in Pompeii’s urban, social, and architectural framework. Viewing the role of the defences as purely military in nature is over-simplified. Their fate was intertwined with that of Pompeii; their construction materials, methods and aesthetics reflect the political, social, and urban development of the city. This study redefines Pompeii’s fortifications, as a central monument that physically and symbolically shaped the city. It considers the internal and external forces that morphed its appearance, and traces how the fortifications served to foster a sense of community. The defences emerge as a dynamic, ideologically freighted monument, subject to manipulation and appropriation that was critical to the image and identity of Pompeii. The book is a unique narrative of the social and urban development of the city from foundation to the eruption of Vesuvius, through the lens of the monument most critical to its independence and survival.

The Fortifications of Pompeii and Ancient Italy

The Fortifications of Pompeii and Ancient Italy PDF Author: Ivo Van der Graaff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429868405
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book

Book Description
The fortifications of Pompeii stand as the ancient city’s largest, oldest, and best preserved public monument. Over its 700-year history, Pompeii invested significant amounts of money, resources, and labor into re-building, maintaining, and upgrading the walls. Each intervention on the fortifications marked a pivotal event of social and political change, signalling dramatic shifts in Pompeii’s urban, social, and architectural framework. Viewing the role of the defences as purely military in nature is over-simplified. Their fate was intertwined with that of Pompeii; their construction materials, methods and aesthetics reflect the political, social, and urban development of the city. This study redefines Pompeii’s fortifications, as a central monument that physically and symbolically shaped the city. It considers the internal and external forces that morphed its appearance, and traces how the fortifications served to foster a sense of community. The defences emerge as a dynamic, ideologically freighted monument, subject to manipulation and appropriation that was critical to the image and identity of Pompeii. The book is a unique narrative of the social and urban development of the city from foundation to the eruption of Vesuvius, through the lens of the monument most critical to its independence and survival.

Rethinking the Roman City

Rethinking the Roman City PDF Author: Dunia Filippi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351115405
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The spatial turn has brought forward new analytical imperatives about the importance of space in the relationship between physical and social networks of meaning. This volume explores this in relation to approaches and methodologies in the study of urban space in Roman Italy. As a consequence of these new imperatives, sociological studies on ancient Roman cities are flourishing, demonstrating a new set of approaches that have developed separately from "traditional" historical and topographical analyses. Rethinking the Roman City represents a convergence of these different approaches to propose a new interpretive model, looking at the Roman city and one of its key elements: the forum. After an introductory discussion of methodological issues, internationally-know specialists consider three key sites of the Roman world – Rome, Ostia and Pompeii. Chapters focus on physical space and/or the use of those spaces to inter-relate these different approaches. The focus then moves to the Forum Romanum, considering the possible analytical trajectories available (historical, topographical, literary, comparative and sociological), and the diversity of possible perspectives within each of these, moving towards an innovative understanding of the role of the forum within the Roman city. This volume will be of great value to scholars of ancient cities across the Roman world, well as historians of urban society and development throughout the ancient world.

Neighbourhoods and City Quarters in Antiquity

Neighbourhoods and City Quarters in Antiquity PDF Author: Annette Haug
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111248097
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Studies on ancient urbanity either concerns individual buildings or the city as a whole. This volume, instead, addresses a meso-scale of urbanity: the socio-spatial organisation of ancient cities. Its temporal focus is on Late Republican and Imperial Italy, and more specifically the cities of Pompeii and Ostia. Referring to a praxeological and phenomenological perspective, it looks at neighbourhoods and city quarters as basic categories of design and experience. With the terms 'neighbourhood and 'city quarter' the volume proposes two different methodological approaches: Neighbourhood here refers to the face-to-face relation between people living next to each other - thus the small-scale environment centred around a house and an individual. Neighbourhoods thus do not constitute a (collectively defined) urban territory with clear borders, but are rather constituted by individual experiences. In contrast, city quarters are understood as areas that share certain characteristics.

Principles of Decoration in the Roman World

Principles of Decoration in the Roman World PDF Author: Annette Haug
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110732211
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This book explores the manner in which architectural settings and action contexts influenced the perception of decoration in the Roman world. Crucial to the relationship between ancient viewers and media was the concept of decor, a term employed by Vitruvius and other Roman authors to describe the appropriateness of particular decorative elements to the environment in which they were located. The papers in this volume examine a diverse range of decorated spaces, from press rooms to synagogues, through the lens of decor. In doing so, they shed new light on the decorative principles employed across Roman Italy and beyond.

Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius

Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius PDF Author: Pedar W. Foss
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000557189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius is a forensic examination of two of the most famous letters from the ancient Mediterranean world: Pliny the Younger’s Epistulae 6.16 and 6.20, which offer a contemporary account of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. These letters, sent to the historian Tacitus, provide accounts by Pliny the Younger about what happened when Mt Vesuvius exploded, destroying the surrounding towns and countryside, including Pompeii and Herculaneum, and killing his uncle, Pliny the Elder. This volume provides the first comprehensive full-length treatment of these documents, contextualized by evidence-rich biographies for both Plinys, and a synthesis of the latest archaeological and volcanological research which answers questions about the eruption date. A new collation of sources results in a detailed manuscript tradition and an authoritative Latin text, while commentaries on each letter offer copiously referenced insights on their structure, style, and meaning. Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius offers a thorough companion to these letters, and to the eruption, which will be of interest not only to those working on Vesuvius, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and the works of Pliny but also to general readers, Latin students, and scholars of the Roman world more broadly.

Place-Making in the Declarative City

Place-Making in the Declarative City PDF Author: Beatrix Busse
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110634759
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This volume looks at the concept of the declarative city from an interdisciplinary perspective, comprising literary and linguistic studies, arts and art history, discourse analysis, as well as urban planning. The various contributions demonstrate the semiotic complexity and inconsistency of declarative and discursive practices in different social, cultural, aesthetic, and historical contexts.

The Origins of Concrete Construction in Roman Architecture

The Origins of Concrete Construction in Roman Architecture PDF Author: Marcello Mogetta
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108845681
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
A study of the innovation and transfer of the building technology at the root of ancient Rome's architectural revolution.

Life and Death in the Roman Suburb

Life and Death in the Roman Suburb PDF Author: Allison L. C. Emmerson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198852754
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Defined by borders both physical and conceptual, the Roman city stood apart as a concentration of life and activity that was legally, economically, and ritually divided from its rural surroundings. Death was a key area of control, and tombs were relegated outside city walls from the Republican period through Late Antiquity. Given this separation, an unexpected phenomenon marked the Augustan and early Imperial periods: Roman cities developed suburbs, built-up areas beyond their boundaries, where the living and the dead came together in densely urban environments. Life and Death in the Roman Suburb examines these districts, drawing on the archaeological remains of cities across Italy to understand the character of Roman suburbs and to illuminate the factors that led to their rise and decline, focusing especially on the tombs of the dead. Whereas work on Roman cities has tended to pass over funerary material, and research on death has concentrated on issues seen as separate from urbanism, Emmerson introduces a new paradigm, considering tombs within their suburban surroundings of shops, houses, workshops, garbage dumps, extramural sanctuaries, and major entertainment buildings, in order to trace the many roles they played within living cities. Her investigations show how tombs were not passive memorials, but active spaces that facilitated and furthered the social and economic life of the city, where relationships between the living and the dead were an enduring aspect of urban life.

Urban Life in the Distant Past

Urban Life in the Distant Past PDF Author: Michael Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009249045
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The book describes a novel approach to early cities that is transdisciplinary, scientific, historical, and based on social-science knowledge.

The Porta Stabia Neighborhood at Pompeii Volume I

The Porta Stabia Neighborhood at Pompeii Volume I PDF Author: Steven J. R. Ellis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192692542
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 779

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Book Description
This is the first of four volumes that present the results from the University of Cincinnati's archaeological excavations of the Porta Stabia neighborhood at Pompeii. These excavations targeted two town blocks on either side of the via Stabiana (insulae VIII.7 and I.1), which comprised modest houses, shops, workshops, food and drink outlets, and hospitality buildings. The present volume describes and documents the phased, structural development of this neighborhood over several centuries. The earliest discernible activity here dates to the 6th century BCE, with the insulae taking their definitive shape only in the 2nd century BCE. It is from this time that production activities dominate the neighborhood, only to be wholly replaced by retail-oriented street-fronts from the early 1st century CE. Underpinning this narrative of urban development is a focus on the social and structural making of the Porta Stabia neighborhood, along with an interest in both the micro- (urban site formation processes) and macro-contextualization of the site (setting the results within a larger historic and urban framework).