Roman Walls of Milan
About
Mediolanum got its first circuit of masonry walls in 49 BCE when the town became a Roman municipium, enclosing a roughly square area about 700 meters on a side. These republican walls stayed the city's only fortification until Maximian's much larger extension nearly two centuries later, in 286-305 CE, well after this snapshot. A surviving tower base near the Carrobbio marks where the Porta Ticinensis once pierced this original line. Frederick Barbarossa finally razed the masonry circuit during the 1162 siege of Milan.
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 →