City Walls of Luni
About
Roman colonists enclosed their new town with defensive walls in 177 BCE, the year Luna's colony was founded on land taken from the Ligurian Apuani. The fortified circuit closed off about 39 hectares of the coastal plain along the Magra river. Poets remembered the city for its white walls centuries later. By 117 CE those walls had already sheltered five generations of colonists.
What happened here
A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →