prehistoric
Bronze Age, then in a very much later Etruscan town, and thirdly on
one or two sites of middle Italy connected with the third or fourth
century B.C. These evidences are scanty and in part uncertain, and
their bearing on our problem is not always clear, but they claim a
place in an account of Italian town-planning. To them must be added,
fourthly, the important evidence which points to the use of a system
closely akin to town-planning in early Rome itself.

_The Terremare_ (fig. 11).

(i) We begin in the Bronze Age, somewhere between 1400 and 800 B.C.,
amidst the so-called Terremare. More than a hundred of these strange
settlements have been examined by Pigorini, Chierici, and other
competent Italians. Most of them occur in a well-defined district
between the Po and the Apennines, with Piacenza at its west end and
Bologna at its east end. Some have also been noted on the north bank
of the Po near Mantua, both east and west of the Mincio, and two or
three elsewhere in Italy. Archaeologically, they all belong to the
Bronze Age; they seem, further, to be the work of a race distinct from
any previous dwellers in North Italy, which had probably just moved
south from the Danubian plains. At some time or other this race had
dwelt in lake-villages. They were now settled on dry ground and far
away from lakes--one of their hamlets is high in the Apennines, nearly
1,900 ft. above the sea. But they still kept in the Terremare the
lacustrine fashion of their former homes.

The nature of these strange villages can best be explained by an
account of the best-known and the largest example of them (fig. 11).
At Castellazzo di Fontanellato, a little west of Parma, are the
vestiges of a settlement which, with its defences, covered an area of
about forty-three acres. In outline it was four-sided; its east and
west sides were parallel to one another, and the whole resembled a
rectangle which had been pulled a trifle askew. Round it ran a solid
earthen rampart, 50 ft. broad at the base and strengthened with
woodwork (plan, B). In front of the rampart was a wet ditch (A), 100
ft. wide, fed with fresh water from a neighbouring brook by an inlet
at the south-western corner (C) and emptied by an outfall on the east
(D). One wooden bridge gave access to this artificial island at its
southern end (E). The area within the rampart, a little less than
thirty acres in extent, was divided into four parts by two main
streets, which wou