ENTRANDO IN CITTÀ: RUOLO E PERCEZIONE DELL’AREA CENTRALE TRA L’ETÀ REGIA E LA MEDIA ETÀ IMPERIALE

Abstract

The perception of the city and its routes corresponds to an identifying moment of Rome itself. The image of Rome changes
radically over time as a result of the monumental and infrastructural transformations of the urban fabric. Traveling along the natural
paths of the “Square Rome” of the early Roman Kingdom period, which coincided with the Palatine Hill, was very different
from entering the city through the streets of the time of the Tarquinian dynasty, when the Servius urbs expanded to the Septimontium.
And so the image of the republican city, in which the economic, social and religious aspects are concentrated in the
Forum, was perceived in a radically different way; or even Rome during the Imperial era, when the city was a megalopolis in which
the centre was dominated by monumental buildings, representative of imperial ideology.

Keywords: Perception, viability, orography, toponymy.