en in northern Italy retain their ancient
streets in singular perfection. Yet even there cities like Padua and
Mantua, Genoa and Pisa, have lost the signs of their older fashion.
So, too, in the provinces. In the Danubian lands only one town can
even be supposed to preserve a few of its Roman streets. In all the
once great cities of that region, Sirmium and Siscia, Poetovio and
Celeia and Emona, they have wholly gone; you may walk across the sites
to-day and seek them in vain in modern street or hedgerow or lane. In
Gaul there were many Roman municipalities in the south; there were
many towns of lesser rank but equal wealth in the centre and west and
north. But we owe our knowledge of their town-plans to an inscription
from Orange and to some excavations at Autun and Trier. Cologne and
Trier alone, or almost alone, keep Roman streets in modern use, and
they are significant. Both became Roman towns in the first century;
both held colonial rank; both have lived on continuously ever since
and hardly changed their names. Yet both bear to-day the stamp of the
Middle Ages, and the Roman streets which they use are small and nearly
unrecognizable fragments.

There is, indeed, no law of survivals. Chance--that convenient ancient
word to denote the interaction of many imponderable forces--has ruled
one way in one place and otherwise in another. Sometimes monuments
have alone survived, sometimes only streets, and we can seldom give
reasons for this contrast of fates. At Pola, gates, temples, and
amphitheatre still tell of the Roman past and the modern town-square
keeps so plainly the tradition of the Forum that you cannot walk
across it without a sense of what it was. Yet not a single street
agrees with those of the Roman 'colonia'. In the Lombard and Tuscan
plains, at Turin and Pavia and Piacenza, at Florence and Lucca, the
Roman streets are still in use, just as the old Roman field-ways still
divide up the fertile plains outside those towns. But, save in Turin,
hardly one Roman stone has been left upon another. In the no less
fertile plain of the lower Rhone, at Nimes and Arles and Orange, the
stately ruins wake the admiration of the busiest and least learned
traveller; of the Roman streets there is no sign.

Britain has enjoyed less continuity of civilization than any other
western province; in Britain the survivals are even fewer. In London,
within the limits of the Roman city, no street to-day follows the
course of any Roma