These Terremare bear a strong likeness to the later Italian town-planning, and they are usually taken to be the oldest discoverable traces of that system.  This means that the Italian town-planning was derived from other sources besides Greece or the East, since the Terremare are far older than Hippodamus or even Nebuchadnezzar and Sennacherib (pp. 23, 29).  It must be added that our present knowledge does not allow us to follow the actual development of the Terremare into historic times, and to link them closely with the later civilization of Central Italy.  When some modern scholars call the men of the Terremare by the name ‘Italici’, they express a hope rather than a proven fact.  It may be safer, for the moment, to avoid that name and to refrain from theories as to the exact relation between prehistoric and historic.  But we shall see below that the existence of a relation between the two is highly probable.

Marzabotto (fig. 12).

[Illlustration:  FIG. 12.  MARZABOTTO.  (AB, FG, CD, main streets.  The shading represents excavated houses.)]

(ii) A greater puzzle, dating probably from the fifth century B.C., meets us in the ruins of a nameless little Etruscan town which stood outside of Etruria proper, on the north slopes of the Apennines.  Its site is fifteen miles south of Bologna, close to the modern Marzabotto, on the left bank of the little river Reno.  Only a tiny part has been uncovered.  But the excavators have not hesitated to complete their results conjecturally into a rectangular town-plan, with streets crossing at right angles and oblong blocks of houses measuring from 158 to 176 yds. in length and 37 or 44 or 71 yds. in width (fig. 12).  The whole must have been laid out at once, and the smaller remains seem to show that this was done by Etruscans.  In the fourth century the place was sacked by the Gauls, and though there was later occupation,[44] its extent is doubtful.[45]

Further excavation is, however, needed to confirm this generally accepted interpretation of the place.  Nothing has been noted elsewhere in Etruria or its confines to connect the Etruscans with any rectangular form of town-plan.  At Veii, for example, most of the Etruscan city has lain desolate and unoccupied ever since the Romans destroyed it, but the site shows no vestige of streets crossing at right angles or of oblong blocks of houses.  At Vetulonia the excavated fragment of an Etruscan city shows only curving and irregular streets.[46] Nor is there real reason to believe that the ’Etruscan teaching’ learnt by Rome included an art of town-planning (p. 71) or that, as a recent French writer has conjectured, the Etruscans brought any such art with them from the East and communicated it to the West.  We must conclude that at Marzabotto we have a piece of evidence which we cannot set into its proper historical framework.  We might perhaps call it an early blend of Greek and Italian methods and compare it with Naples (p. 100).  It is odd that four out of seven house-blocks should measure just under 120 Roman ft. in width and thus approximate to a figure which we meet often elsewhere in the Roman world (p. 79).  But it would be well to learn more of the plan by further excavation.