5 - Embellishing the Streets of Ostia

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Since the millennium, the study of Roman urban layouts has taken on a new dynamic, focussing on streets as places of activity, social interaction and movement rather than just as a static aspect of the urban framework. A major contribution to this area of research has been made by the Space Syntax analysis which was Hanna Stöger's greatest contribution to the study of imperial Ostia. As Newsome has observed, however, Space Syntax analysis on its own can provide only a hypothetical interpretation of the relative importance of the individual elements in an urban street network, the main value of which is in supporting other independent data on the ground (Newsome 2011, 5). In the cases of both Ostia and Pompeii this has been investigated predominantly in relation to the distribution of shops/workshops (tabernae).3 There are, however, other elements of the built streetscapes that can be used in conjunction with Space Syntax analysis to further our understanding of how the urban street network functioned, of how visual hierarchies were constructed, and how these were manipulated by the choices and priorities of those responsible for the façades of the buildings which lined the streets.

This paper therefore explores three different ways in which the street façades of imperial Ostia were elaborated, based on the information visible in the excavated area of the city, in relation to the street hierarchy which emerged from Hanna Stöger's Space Syntax analysis. It takes as one of its starting points her first formal publication on Ostia, a study of the monumental entrances, which she argued was one of the major ways in which owners could call attention to their buildings (Stöger 2007). In addition she drew attention to two more forms of elaboration which she argued needed further attention: porticoes, which she saw as being on the whole mutually exclusive with these articulated doorways; and decorative plaques and other elements. These have since been treated individually in more or less detail (DeLaine 2005, Schoevaert 2018, 209-219; DeLaine 2018b), but not together as a way of understanding the visual language of Ostia's streets and how this related to social interaction.