Rehausser la cité. Les transformations du réseau viaire de la région II à la lumière des « archives Vaglieri »

The stratigraphic excavations carried out in Ostia by Dante Vaglieri at the beginning of the 20th century first highlighted the several raisings of the city levels. Since then, many sondages have provided new evidence about this phenomenon which was broadly discussed during a conference organized in 1998 at Rome. However, the papers proposed during this meeting focused mainly on the raising of levels identified within a few buildings. In other words, these studies presented evidence from excavations isolated and scattered across the urban fabric, from the Terme del Nettuno (II, IV, 2) until the Schola del Traiano (IV, V, 15-16) or from the Campo della Magna Mater (IV, I) until the Insula di Giove e Ganimede (I, IV, 2). In contrast, none of these papers dealt with the raisings of the street roadbed although they are very informative about this vexed question.
This talk aims to fill this gap by taking into account the archival materials as well as the latest stratigraphic evidence. Obviously, this paper cannot consider every street of Ostia and focuses on the eastern and western decumanus. The earliest data provide much information about the stratigraphy of these streets, but little dating evidence was available. In other words, the digging of the trenches carried out before the publication of the Topografia Generale in 1953 provided no more than a relative chronology. As a result, my enquiry seeks to connect the different levels of the street with these one of the adjacent buildings dated by stamps or stratigraphic evidence. This enquiry assumes that the ground level of a new building cannot be built beneath the roadbed, so much so that this reading can be seen as a proxy to further understand the transformation of the urban fabric of Ostia.