void that this
Greek city of Naples adopted an Italian street-scheme, but laid it out
with more scientific regularity than the early Italians themselves.
When this occurred and why, is wholly unknown. That the result is not
an unpractical form of building is shown by the fact that similar long
and narrow house-blocks are a characteristic feature of modern
Liverpool, though they seldom occur in other English towns, unless
intermixed with square and other blocks.

CHAPTER VIII

ROMAN PROVINCIAL TOWN-PLANS. I

The provinces, and above all the western provinces of the Roman
Empire, tell us even more than Italy about Roman town-planning. But
they tell it in another way. They contain many towns which were
founded full-grown, or re-founded and at the same time rebuilt, and
which were in either case laid out on the Roman plan. But the modern
successors of these towns have rarely kept the network of their
ancient streets in recognizable detail. Though walls, gates, temples,
baths, palaces, amphitheatres still stand stubbornly erect amidst a
flood of modern dwellings, they are but the islands which mark a
submerged area. The paths and passages by which men once moved across
that area have vanished beneath the waves and cannot be recovered from
any survey of these visible fragments. There is hardly one modern town
in all the European and African provinces of the Roman Empire which
still uses any considerable part of its ancient street-plan. In our
own country there is no single case. In Gaul and Germany, two or three
streets in Cologne and one or two in Trier are the sole survivals.[87]
In Illyricum there is no example unless possibly at Belgrade. In the
Spanish peninsula the town of Braga in northern Portugal seems to
stand alone. In Roman Africa--Tunis, Algiers and Morocco--no instance
has survived the Arab conquest.[88]

[87] For Orange see p. 107. Nimes may possibly retain one or two
streets of the Roman Nemausus, but it is very doubtful; see
Menard's map of 1752. See further in general p. 142.

[88] Though, curiously enough, the chess-board pattern of field
divisions has survived in the neighbourhood of Carthage.

If, however, survivals of ancient streets are as rare in the provinces
as they are common in Italy, the provinces yield other evidence
unknown to Italy. In these lands, and above all in Africa, the sites
of many Roman towns have lain desolate and untouched since Roman days,
waitin