houses, Italian

houses, Italian
The social structures which underlay the Greek house, a household unit (in Greek, oikos), which was capable of representing both a citizen lot in the space of the town, and the symbolic abode of the head of a lineage, were shared by Italy in the period of its first urbanism. Where there was an idea of equality among a limited group of ruling families the two ideas coalesced comfortably. Etruscan urbanism shows signs of both ends of this spectrum; fine aristocratic houses are known, which tally with the power and pretensions of what we know of some of the city élites, while the urban texture of places like Marzabotto resembles the topography of wider citizen franchise as seen at Olynthus or Priene. The discoveries of the 1980s on the slopes of the Palatine hill at Rome showed how already in the 6th cent. bc the Roman élite was living along the Sacred Way (via Sacra),...

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