L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 18 L'Italo-Americano L o n d o n d i d n o t begin with Lon- d o n e r s . A r o u n d the middle of the first century AD, Roman engineers and mer- chants looked at a stretch of the Thames where the river was narrow enough to bridge a n d d e e p e n o u g h t o t a k e ships, so they decided it was a useful place to build. Lon- dinium grew around that crossing, first as a trading set- t l e m e n t a n d t h e n a s t h e a d m i n i s t r a t i v e c e n t e r o f R o m a n B r i t a i n ; a l t h o u g h almost everything standing there now belongs to another age, there are some places in this beautiful city that still "speak Latin": London Bridge still crosses the river close to the Roman site, parts of the old wall survive, and streets including Aldgate, Bishops- gate and Newgate preserve t h e m e m o r y o f e n t r a n c e s through defenses first laid out nearly two thousand years ago. Modern London is vastly larger than Londinium ever was, of course, but its oldest center is still sitting where Rome put it. Once you start looking, you'll find out that, across Europe, cities we now think of as unmistakably British, French, German, Austrian or Spanish occupy places select- ed and organized by Roman p l a n n e r s , and in several cases, even their names sur- vived the journey. Of course, this is not to say that Rome invented urban life every- where it went: Celtic, Iberian and other communities were a l r e a d y l i v i n g i n m a n y o f these regions, sometimes on or near the same sites. What the Romans, however, did extraordinarily well was rec- ognize where a settlement c o u l d b e c o m e s o m e t h i n g larger, particularly where rivers met, roads crossed or an imperial frontier needed soldiers. M a i n z , i n G e r m a n y , i s almost a textbook example of it: the Roman Mogontiacum began with legionary camps established under Drusus on h i g h g r o u n d o p p o s i t e t h e mouth of the Main, a position f r o m w h i c h R o m e c o u l d watch the Rhine and push f a r t h e r i n t o G e r m a n i a . Around 12,000 soldiers creat- e d a c o n s i d e r a b l e m a r k e t before anyone had thought about building a proper city, and craftsmen and merchants settled around them because twelve thousand men needed s h o e s , f o o d , t o o l s , w i n e . Ports appeared along the Rhine, a bridge crossed the river by the first century AD, an aqueduct supplied water, and Mogontiacum eventual- ly acquired temples, baths, substantial houses and a the- ater that could hold around 10,000 spectators. Before AD 90, it had become the capital of Upper Germania. Vienna followed a similar p a t h , w i t h V i n d o b o n a b e i n g e s t a b l i s h e d a s a legionary camp in AD 97 to help guard Rome's northern frontier along the Danube; b y i t s h e i g h t , m o r e t h a n 30,000 people were living within the area of the present city, among them soldiers and immigrants from other parts of the Empire. Today the remains of officers' hous- e s s u r v i v e b e n e a t h t h e Hoher Markt, right in the middle of central Vienna. The same happened far- t h e r w e s t , a l t h o u g h n o t always from an empty start- ing point, as in the case of L y o n , w h i c h h a d b e e n inhabited long before the Romans arrived. Its position where the Rhône and Saône meet had already made it part of Mediterranean trade, but the Romans brought the town to the next level in 43 BC, when Lucius Munatius Plancus founded the Roman colony of Lugdunum there, and under Augustus it devel- oped into one of the princi- pal administrative cen- ters of Gaul. The reason is easy enough to understand if y o u l o o k a t a m a p : f r o m those two rivers, roads and trade could spread north, west and south, and Lug- d u n u m b e c a m e t h e p o i n t t h r o u g h w h i c h m u c h o f Roman Gaul communicated. The theaters on Fourvière Hill still stand on the site where the colony was found- ed. Paris has a slightly more complex story to tell, because t h e P a r i s i i w e r e a l r e a d y established around the Seine b e f o r e R o m e c o n q u e r e d G a u l , a n d c a l l i n g t h e R o m a n s t h e s i m p l e "founders of Paris" would e r a s e t h e m . Y e t R o m a n Lutetia gave the developing city an urban form that can still be read today: the main n o r t h - s o u t h s t r e e t , t h e c a r d o m a x i m u s , r a n across the Left Bank and sur- v i v e s i n t h e l i n e o f R u e Saint-Jacques, which is noticeably straighter than many of the medieval streets a r o u n d i t . L u t e t i a h a d a f o r u m , b a t h s a n d a n amphitheater, and the street that once connected the city to the wider imperial road network still takes Parisians through the Latin Quarter. Back in Germany, we find Cologne, a city whose name tells everything we need to know; the settlement on the Rhine became Colonia Clau- d i a A r a A g r i p p i n e n s i u m under Emperor Claudius, with the first word of that f o r m i d a b l e t i t l e s i m p l y meaning "colony." Over the centuries Colonia became Köln in German and Cologne in English and French, while the modern city center con- tinued to occupy the site of the Roman town. Here, too, there had been an earlier community, associated with t h e U b i i ; R o m e d i d n o t invent the place so much as give it the political status and urban structure from which the later city developed. Fur- ther west Trier, the ancient A u g u s t a T r e v e r o r u m , began as a Roman colony a n d g r e w s o w e a l t h y a n d important that by the end of t h e t h i r d c e n t u r y i t h a d become one of the imperial capitals of the Tetrarchy, earning the description "sec- o n d R o m e . " T h e P o r t a Nigra, imperial baths and enormous basilica give some idea of what that meant, and e v e n U N E S C O n o t e s t h a t nowhere north of the Alps preserves a comparable con- centration of major Roman buildings. The list could keep going: York began with the fortress of Eboracum, Strasbourg with Argentoratum, Man- c h e s t e r w i t h M a m u c i u m , R e g e n s b u r g w i t h C a s t r a Regina, only to name a few, all towns connected to one another through miles and miles of roads we still travel on today. By the fifth centu- ry, the western Empire was breaking apart, but Europe did not suddenly acquire a d i f f e r e n t g e o g r a p h y ; t h e Thames still narrowed where Londinium had been built, the Rhône and Saône still met beneath Lugdunum, the Rhine still carried traffic past Cologne and Mainz, and the D a n u b e s t i l l r a n t h r o u g h Vindobona. Rome lost the c i t i e s p o l i t i c a l l y , b u t t h e cities never really stopped benefiting from the choices Rome had made. And this may be the most durable part of the Roman city after all: not the wall or the theater or the street uncovered beneath a modern square, but the decision that this was a use- ful place for people to live together. Europe has been agreeing with quite a few of those decisions ever since. GIULIA FRANCESCHINI A journey through the Europe Rome built Londinium grew around a crossing of the Thames, and London Bridge still carries the modern city across the river close to the site chosen by Roman engineers nearly two thousand years ago (Original image created for L'Italo-Americano with the assistance of AI) HERITAGE HISTORY IDENTITY TRADITIONS

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