A walled colonia of about 16 hectares, laid out on a grid of insulae around the crossing of the cardo and decumanus, with every public building placed and proportioned as Vitruvius directs.
Vitruvius’s first book tells the founder of a city what to do in order: choose a healthy site; build the walls with projecting towers; lay out the streets so that none lines up with a prevailing wind; then place the forum, the temples and the other public buildings where they belong. This town follows those instructions. Its grid is turned twenty-two and a half degrees from the cardinal points, the angle that sets its streets between the eight winds of his wind-rose.
At the crossing of the two main streets lies the forum, two parts wide to three long, ringed by porticoes, with the Capitolium at its head and the basilica on its warm flank. The theatre has its own quarter, its seats turned from the south; Apollo’s temple stands beside it, Mercury’s in the forum, and Mars keeps watch outside the walls. The houses are of two kinds: tall insulae of brick over rows of shops, and single-storey atrium houses, with a few great domus proportioned by Book VI.
Click any building to see what it is, which rule shaped it, and where Vitruvius says so.