Economic space and movement between Roman towns, their suburbia and territories : the regional perspective

This chapter focuses on material aspects of urban topography and regional landscape use, considering the role of towns as market centres, of their suburbia as highly productive zones sustaining the city dwellers, of primary and secondary road and river networks as the arteries of economic movement and of the many ways goods flow between the towns and their territories. It discusses the regional approach to the debate on the Roman spatial economy and uses examples from the region of central Adriatic Italy that has in recent years become a good case study for the understanding of Roman regional networks and analysing space and movement. Especially the wide-angle approach, sustained by the recent results from large-scale non-invasive fieldwork operations on a series of towns and their countryside in this region, allows developing a model for studying topographic–economical patterns that can easily be compared with other areas of the Roman world. The dense network of moderately sized urban centres encountered here between the Adriatic and the Apennines reflects very well how many Roman towns functioned as service centres rather than large population centres being conditioned by their specific position in a landscape with limited carrying capacity and within regional and supra-regional economic systems