Recherche par auteur > Lopez Garcia Antonio

How did the lived space of a residential neighbourhood transform in the passage between the Antiquity and the Middle Ages? This paper aims to examine the reshaping of the inhabited areas of the west bank of the Tiber in Rome, which during the last centuries of the Empire and the Middle Ages experienced a notable habitat contraction and transformation due to several social, economic and environmental vicissitudes that changed forever the urban environment of Rome. The regio of Trans Tiberim was one of the main residential quarters of Rome, which symbolizes the residential essence of the Urbs in the late antique period. Observing the data reported in archaeological and historical records, we propose a reinterpretation of the city's adaptation process during the Late Antiquity.

During the late imperial era, the vibrant, highly urbanised and interconnected city of Rome, transformed into a completely different cityscape with vast uninhabited areas within the city walls in the mid-6th century. Rome predominantly went through a multi-causal degradation of the urban form triggered by multiple factors, such as economic, political, martial, environmental, as well as cultural. However, these multi-causal crises do not always end in completely abandoning the urban space. In some cases, the city adapts the previous infrastructures to the new reality and produces a new urban tissue. Social and religious changes often create this effect on the city. Trans Tiberim offers an inspiring space to examine how the urban shape is influenced by the substitution of pagan sacred areas with Christian buildings during the late imperial era, and how this process created new attraction nodes for the population that settled in new neighbourhoods around the churches and other religious complexes, consolidating the urban tissue of the medieval city.