City of Rome

But you can see from the relatively crooked and narrow streets of the city of Rome as they look from above today, you can see that again the city grew in a fairly ad hoc way, as I mentioned. It wasn't planned all at once. It just grew up over time beginning in the 8th century B.C. Now this is interesting because what we know about the Romans is when they were left to their own devices and they could build a city from scratch, they didn't let it grow in an ad hoc way. They structured it in a very methodical way that was basically based on military strategy, military planning. The Romans, they couldn't have conquered the world without obviously having a masterful military enterprise and they, everywhere they went on their various campaigns, their various military campaigns, they would build camps and those camps were always laid out in a very geometric plan along the grid, usually square or rectangular. So when we begin to see the Romans building their ideal Roman city, they turn to that so-called costrum or military camp design.