by David J. Newsome
(ed. with Ray Laurence). Oxford University Press
Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space demonstrates how studies of the Roman city are shifting focus from static... more
Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space demonstrates how studies of the Roman city are shifting focus from static architecture to activities and motion within urban spaces. This volume provides detailed case studies from the three best-known cities from Roman Italy, revealing how movement contributes to our understanding of the ways different elements of society interacted in space, and how the movement of people and materials shaped urban development.
The chapters in this book examine the impressions left by the movement of people and vehicles as indentations in the archaeological and historical record, and as impressions upon the Roman urban consciousness. Through a broad range of historical issues, this volume studies movement as it is found at the city gate, in public squares and on the street, and as it is represented in texts. Its broad objective is to make movement meaningful for understanding the economic, cultural, political, religious, and infrastructural behaviours that produced different types and rhythms of interaction in the Roman city.
This volume's interdisciplinary approach will inform the understanding of the city in classics, ancient history, archaeology and architectural history, as well as cultural studies, town planning, urban geography, and sociology.
Introduction:
Making Movement Meaningful (David J. Newsome)
PART I: From Text to Space (and vice-versa): Movement in the Roman City
1. Movement and the Linguistic Turn: Reading Varro’s de Lingua Latina (Diana Spencer)
2. Literature and the Spatial Turn: Movement and Space in Martial’s Epigrams (Ray Laurence)
3. Spatial visibility, Adjacency, Permeability and Degrees of Street Life at Excavated Towns (Akkelies van Nes)
4. Towards a Multisensory Experience of Movement in the City of Rome (Eleanor Betts)
PART II: Movement in the Roman City: infrastructure and organisation
5. The power of nuisances on the Roman street (Jeremy Hartnett)
6. Pes dexter: superstition and the shaping of shopfronts and street activity in the Roman world (Steven J.R. Ellis)
7. Cart Traffic Flow in Pompeii and Rome (Alan Kaiser)
8. Where to Park? Carts, stables and the economics of transport in Pompeii (Eric E. Poehler)
9. The Spatial Organisation of the Movement Economy: The Guild Buildings of Ostia (Hanna Stöger)
PART III: Movement and the Metropolis
10. The Street Life of Ancient Rome (Claire Holleran )
11. The City in Motion: Walking for transport and leisure in the City of Rome (Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis)
12. Movement and the fora in Rome (David J. Newsome)
13. The Game Boards of the Forum Romanum and the Use of Space (Francesco Trifilò)
14. ‘If the axle breaks, what is left of their bodies?’ Construction traffic in Ancient Rome (Diane Favro)
15. Movement and urban development at two city gates in Rome: the Porta Esquilina and Porta Tiburtina (Simon Malmberg and Hans Bjur)
Endpiece – From Movement to Mobility (future directions)
Ray Laurence
"The editors have assembled a team of scholars who possess an impressively wide range of expertise in order to ask how movement within ancient spaces operated. The result is a convincing evocation of Rome, Ostia, and Pompeii as cities filled with living, active, human beings. All the essays are worth consulting, and several are remarkable in their ability to recreate not just the way that Romans walked and rode through their cities in pursuit of daily business, but the noises, smells, and nuisances that they encountered during these intramural travels" (Prof. Anthony Corbeill, University of Kansas)
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