A New Plan for an Ancient Italian City: Gabii Revealed

The city of Gabii was one of the main centers of ancient Latium, yet very little of the settlement is known through archaeology. The site has been the focus of only sporadic exploration, and the available evidence for the urban history and development of the city is extremely fragmentary. New fieldwork has investigated the urban area with magnetometry and core sampling in preparation for a major campaign of new excavations. The results show that Gabii was orthogonally planned around a main, hitherto unknown thoroughfare and that significant structures and associated stratifications are relatively well preserved. The new work has the potential to yield much-needed information, not just about this important center but also about first-millennium B.C.E. urbanism in the Italian peninsula.