Articles by Paolo Liverani

The paper offers a historical and topographical synthesis of the Castelporziano estate, highlighting its exceptional preservation as a coastal landscape protected from modern urbanization near Rome. It emphasizes the strong integration between environmental and archaeological research, showing how tools such as LiDAR contribute both to mapping ancient remains and to understanding vegetation and land use. The study reconstructs the long-term evolution of the area, from protohistoric occupation and lagoon-based economies to the development of a coastal route later formalized as the Via Severiana, along which numerous villas and settlements were established. Particular attention is given to the strategic control of the coastline in the Republican period and to the transformation of the territory in the Imperial age, including the emergence of the Vicus Augustanus and elite residential complexes. In Late Antiquity, imperial landholdings were redistributed to the Church, contributing to changes in settlement patterns and management structures, eventually forming the basis of early medieval domuscultae. Despite gaps in later evidence, the study outlines a continuous reorganization of the landscape. Overall, Castelporziano emerges as a key case study for understanding the interaction between environment, infrastructure, and settlement in the Roman coastal context.

The paper presents a historical and topographical synthesis of the city of Roselle and its surrounding territory, integrating results from recent research with earlier scholarship. It emphasizes the methodological challenges arising from the different investigative approaches applied to urban and rural contexts – excavation in the city and surface survey in the countryside – and highlights the need for their integration to reconstruct coherent historical narratives. From the Archaic period, Roselle emerges as a structured landscape characterized by organized settlement patterns, funerary areas, and a significant wetland system that played a key ecological and economic role over many centuries. During the Late Republican period, the forum area underwent important transformations, including the construction of early basilica-likestructures and elite residences, while the surrounding territory saw the gradual development of villa-based production systems. A major phase of urban reorganization occurred in the Augustan and Julio-Claudian periods, marked by monumentalisation of the forum, construction of public buildings, and increased investment in infrastructure such as water supply systems. This process continued through the Flavian and Trajanic-Hadrianic periods, reflecting sustained prosperity and local elite involvement in urban development. Overall, the study offers a long-term reconstruction of the interaction between city and territory, underlining Roselle’s evolution within broader socio-economic and environmental dynamics.

The contribution draws on the experience gained within the Rome Transformed project on the Eastern Caelian hill, reserving a with more general attention to problems of method. The spatial dimensions of the project pose problems including – but at the same time going beyond – those normally addressed for the visualization of individual surveyed structures. Two points seem crucial: 1) the transparency of metadata and paradata; 2) the tension between too much or too little prescriptive models or ontologies. Visualizing a territory poses peculiar problems; we have several examples in the past, but normally the reconstruction of ancient orography on which to place surveyed structures is not explicitly thematized. The territory imposes a leap in scale in the size and management of the data; forms the palimpsest on which to arrange the views of the individual sectors or structures into which it is divided; defines the ‘conditions of existence’ of topographical and monumental articulation; must consider the effects that older phases impose on later ones. Visualization of a territory is not only a way to present to the scientific community and the wider public in a concise manner the results achieved. Such an approach poses the need to work in an environment in which it is possible to progressively incorporate evidence of a very heterogeneous nature such as archival data, geognostic surveys of different types, surveys using traditional techniques or 3D scanning, and core drilling. The organisation of such heterogeneous data within a single software becomes essential for their subsequent processing. It was therefore necessary to design an application able to manage in a single three-dimensional environment the data produced while maintaining the associated information (metadata and paradigms) in order to allow them to be compared and at the same time guaranteeing full interoperability with the GIS environments in which the modelling activity is carried out.