Matt Gangemi

I’ve been enjoying the series Meet the Romans, and episode 2 really revealed what I love about many ancient Roman cities.  I’ve been to quite a few, though often without knowing beforehand that they were ancient Roman cities.  These include cities like Dubrovnik, Split, La Spezia, Florence, Istanbul, Budapest, and yes, Rome.  The attributes I’ve come to love include: 1. very narrow streets, often not accommodating cars 2. countless 4- to 6-story buildings with a variety of units, from cheap tiny units to large family units with courtyards 3. built into the 1st floor of these buildings are tiny shops – everything from restaurants to banks to bakeries 4. in ancient Rome most housing units weren’t used for much more than sleeping – living was done in the city. You often didn’t have a kitchen, laundry facilities, or even a bathroom. The host Mary Beard tells about the horrors of these things (barely enough room to lie down, the danger of dark small alleys), but I think in a modern world they’d be wonderful (ok, keep private bathrooms). Walk to your job, spend time in a vast variety of restaurants or pubs, experience the feeling of a busy narrow street, chat with neighbors at a public park, and take your kids to relax and play at the public bath or let them play in a public square while you grab a cappuccino. This is heaven to me. The only reason most modern cities aren’t like this is because we force them not to be. We require minimum space for all housing types, design our streets for cars instead of people, limit the height of buildings in most places, and separate our retail from our living zones. The effect is to push the less-rich outward, separate us from other people, and […]