Rare example of an Etruscan occupation site, 25 km from Bologna, northern Italy. Situated in the Reno valley, it was presumably deliberately set on an important Etruscan trade-route. Two distinct phases may perhaps be separated: a 6th-century bc phase, characterized by plain and rather primitive dwellings, with evidence for metalworking; and a 5th-century stage, in which the city appears to have been laid out afresh upon a grid system. On the flat river terrace there are laid out one north-south axis and three eastwest main streets that cut it. The precision of the orientation is striking, and surveying cippi have been found at some of the major intersections (see cippus). It has been suggested that the use of such a grid system indicates, as so often with Greek and Roman examples, a ‘colonial’ town; and indeed that the grid system itself is, in general, transmitted along a Greek-Etruscan-Roman line of borrowing. The town shows sophisticated drainage, both road and domestic. Interesting are the workshops, foundries and kilns that border the principal street and imply, perhaps, a provincial settlement with single-minded devotion to trade, pottery and metal-working. To the northwest, an ‘acropolis’ shows evidence for three temples, fronting south on the same axis as the streets of the town. Occupation, and possibly destruction, by the Boii (see Bologna) in the 4th century bc seems to have brought an end to settlement within the century.
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied