This Neapolis town had, as certain existing streets declare, a peculiar form of town-planning.  The area covered by these streets is an irregular space of 250 acres in the heart of the modern city, about 850 yds. from north to south and 1,000 yds. from east to west.[86] In Roman days three straight streets ran parallel from east to west and a large number of smaller streets, twenty or so, ran at right angles to them from north to south.  The house-blocks enclosed by these streets were all of similar size and shape, a thin oblong of 35 x 180 metres (39 x 198 yds.).  Some of the public buildings naturally trespassed on to more than one ‘insula’; a theatre appears indeed to have stretched over parts of three.  In general, the oblongs seem to have been laid out with great regularity and the angles are right angles, though the ‘insulae’ in the northern and southern rows of house-blocks cannot have been fully rectangular and symmetrical.

[86] The limits are the Castel Capuano on the east, the Strada dell’ Orticello on the north, the church of S. Pietro a Majella on the west, and on the south the churches of S. Marcellino and S. Severino.

This town-plan of Naples differs from any of those noted above.  Its blocks are narrower than those in any Italian town, unless in Modena, and while they resemble the ‘insulae’ of the sixth region of Pompeii (fig. 13), are far more regular than those.  Almost the only close parallel is that of Roman Carthage (fig. 24).  As Naples was by origin and character a Greek city, these narrow oblongs have been supposed to represent a Greek arrangement.  They do not, however, correspond to anything that is known in the Greek lands, either of the Macedonian or of any earlier period.  The conclusion is difficult to avoid that this Greek city of Naples adopted an Italian street-scheme, but laid it out with more scientific regularity than the early Italians themselves.  When this occurred and why, is wholly unknown.  That the result is not an unpractical form of building is shown by the fact that similar long and narrow house-blocks are a characteristic feature of modern Liverpool, though they seldom occur in other English towns, unless intermixed with square and other blocks.

CHAPTER VIII

ROMAN PROVINCIAL TOWN-PLANS.  I

The provinces, and above all the western provinces of the Roman Empire, tell us even more than Italy about Roman town-planning.  But they tell it in another way.  They contain many towns which were founded full-grown, or re-founded and at the same time rebuilt, and which were in either case laid out on the Roman plan.  But the modern successors of these towns have rarely kept the network of their ancient streets in recognizable detail.  Though walls, gates, temples, baths, palaces, amphitheatres still stand stubbornly erect amidst a flood of modern dwellings, they are but the islands which mark a submerged