IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-319-00137-1_12.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Geometry of the Master Plan of Roman Florence and Its Surroundings

In: Architecture and Mathematics from Antiquity to the Future

Author

Listed:
  • Carol Martin Watts

    (Kansas State University, The College of Architecture, Planning and Design)

Abstract

Like many cities founded by the Romans, Florence, the Roman Florentia, was oriented to the cardinal points. The major streets, a north-south cardo and east-west decumanus, met in the center of the rectangular walled town. A gate was located at each of the four intersections of major street and city wall. A grid of secondary streets divided the city into blocks. The steps traced in this paper indicate a logical way in which the colony of Florence could have been laid out, consistent with what is known of Roman practices and with the observable traces of the Roman settlement. Relatively simple geometrical operations integrate the city with its landscape, which is linked with the cosmos through the path of the sun, providing the initial positioning of the city. What at first glance may seem to be a pragmatic adaptation to the site conditions is shown to be a rigorous geometric relationship, predicated on using a meaningful set of whole numbers, in an affirmation of the genius loci of Florentia.

Suggested Citation

  • Carol Martin Watts, 2015. "The Geometry of the Master Plan of Roman Florence and Its Surroundings," Springer Books, in: Kim Williams & Michael J. Ostwald (ed.), Architecture and Mathematics from Antiquity to the Future, edition 127, chapter 0, pages 177-188, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-00137-1_12
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-00137-1_12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-00137-1_12. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.