Course Description
The area around Rome is known as the Campagna Romana (campagna = countryside). Located here are numerous towns, ranging from ancient to modern, representing a wide variety of Italian town types. Since many of these towns are easily accessible by public transportation, they lend themselves to a series of site visits which enables the student to experience them firsthand so as to discover the multiple town forms and to analyse their development over time. Analysis of these smaller towns helps with the understanding of the far more complex city of Rome.
The purpose of this course is to develop a method for analysing towns by examining different types of plans from different historical periods, followed by the application of this method to specific
towns.

Recognition of patterns of planned versus organic growth, location of focal points such as government buildings and town centers, variations in urban density, and identifications of significant pathways through the street net will be used to develop this method. While socio-economic aspects will be considered where such information is available, the main emphasis of the course will be on the physical morphology of the town in relation to its historical development.
Students will be expected to analyse town plans and to draw substantial conclusions based on the comparative method. These conclusions may be presented in different forms, but the common thread will be a series of analytical layers drawn over a base map of the town under study.

Course Method
The course is organized about an alternating series of lectures site visits. The lectures are chronological in the sense that town plans from sequential periods will be examined. Each lecture will also prepare for the following site visit. A manual, comprising a selection of town plans, will be supplied to each student. This will become the basic “text” for the course, though a bibliography to encourage further reading is included in the manual.
Lectures will generally be made up of two or three parts:
a) discussion of the maps of a particular period or type
b) discussion of the characteristics of a selected town to be visited
c) group manipulation of selected plans in the manual upon which each student will attempt to mark the characteristics discussed in (b)
A visit to the town discussed in class will follow each lecture. Since site visits and lectures are complementary, students will be required to attend both. Attendance will be taken and will count.
Students will be expected to submit either an analysis sheet of each town visited in class or an alternate assignment within 24 hours of the visit. A different town will be assigned to each student halfway through the course, so that he/she will have time to visit the town and find material to help develop a reasoned analysis of that town.