About

Rome as the first-ever ancient mega-city reaching c. 1 million inhabitants in the early empire (1st cent. BCE) remains an enigma regarding the way it organised itself and maintained its size for over three centuries. Already Dionysius of Halicarnassus (4.13.3-5; 1st cent. BCE) famously observed that it was impossible to tell where the city actually ended. Having long outgrown the 4th-cent. BCE city walls, the urbanistic structures that developed outside of them, and especially outside the later Aurelian Wall, have never been studied systematically and holistically. Considering that the built environment in any city both shapes and is being shaped by the everyday lives of those inhabiting and using it, we are missing out on some crucial evidence for understanding how Rome’s society worked.
Through a new, contextual approach to a wide range of sources, IN-ROME aims to fill this gap. It will offer the first holistic description and analysis of the urban development and use of space of the Roman territory outside the Servian Wall and within an area of c. 13 km around it (as covered by the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, CIL VI) from the late Republic to the 3rd cent. CE. Bridging the divide between research on the area within and outside of the (late) Aurelian Wall, it will illustrate how different parts of the population (ethnicities, status groups, genders) and their varied activities map onto the city’s surroundings via military stations, meeting places of associations, sanctuaries and cult places, various production sites, quarries and mines, gardens and fields, infrastructure and water supply, market places, baths and entertainment venues, guesthouses, taverns and villas, graveyards and tombs. The aim of this synthesis is not only a more comprehensive description of an inhabited landscape than has been offered to date. IN-ROME intends to conclude from ‘topographical facts’, organising principles (intended or unintended), as well as the likely interactions and relationships between different sectors of society. Methodologically, the project will transform the study of Rome’s urban fabric by recontextualising a total of c. 50,000 inscriptions whose provenance from a specific location within the city’s territory is known or determinable with some likelihood, and which help to restore agency to the archaeologically attested activities. 

To achieve these goals, the project is organised in five Work Packages (WPs). 

WP 1: Under the direction of Silvia Orlandi from La Sapienza University di Roma, Chantal Gabrielli will complete the editing and integration of all remaining inscriptions from Rome with a certain or likely provenance into the Epigraphic Database Roma (EDR), resulting in a total of c. 50,000 items. Under the direction of Julian Bogdani, Eleonora Iacopini will connect all geolocation information to a Geographic Information System (GIS).

WP 2: Michael Seidl and his team from the Austrian Institute of Technology are georeferencing and vectorizing the mapsheets of the Catasto Gregoriano, leveraging the latest machine learning techniques to automate the process. They design the Gazetteer Database and graphical data entry interface into which the data from historic land registers (brogliardi) are inserted. Further maps, landowners and toponyms will be added later to this GIS database, which will then be linked to EDR.

WP 3: Umberto Soldovieri addresses potential systematic biases in interpreting patterns emerging from inscription mapping due to external circumstances such as collection histories and uneven survival, documentation, exploration etc. by studying the history of finding, recording and collecting inscriptions within the CIL VI area.

WP 4: consists of four research sub-projects (SPs 1-4) that explore specific under-researched questions feeding into the overarching project aims and into WP 5.

• SP 1: will address the landscape of commercial activities, infrastructure and natural resources including production/manufacturing, hospitality and retail, the road system, water supply, agriculture, mining and quarrying. 
• SP 2: will research the presence of different ethnicities in Rome, discussing also Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew inscriptions . Foreign cults are included in SP 3 and Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew epitaphs contribute to WP 5. The presence of Parthians, Sassanians, Armenians and Indians in Rome is the subject of Davide M. Meucci’s PhD thesis. Mary-Evelyn Farrior studies select cases of Greek inscriptions clustering in certain areas of Rome in her Columbia PhD thesis and is associated to the project.
• SP 3: Consuelo Manetta studies the distribution and nature of religious cult and worship (excluding oriental cults: see SP 2) across the project area, addressing the full range of cults and their location, patronage and range of worshippers based on a ‘close reading’ of epigraphic evidence within its archaeological and topographical context. 
• SP 4: Francesca D’Andrea is concerned with the process of the city’s expansion across the Servian Wall and its gradual transition into a more rural countryside, focusing on the south-eastern sector of the project area, which is particularly well suited for understanding changes in landownership, the nature of the horti, the changing and fluid limits of the continentia and the impact on funerary activities of the latter’s extension.

WP 5 comprises the PI’s Barbara Borg, research that will result in a holistic, synthetic and diachronic view of the structure and organisation of the entire project area as described above. It will build on the results from WP4 but extend the range of features and activities to include esp. villas, funerary activity, entertainment structures, and military presence. It will ask questions about gender and ethnicity beyond SP 2, and about patterns of landownership and locations preferred by different families or status groups. It will recontextualise the results of previous scholarship, an approach that has resulted in substantially new understandings in the PI’s previous research rather than being just a convenient summary. Crucially, it will study the distribution patterns of inscriptions that testify to specific activities and the people behind them.