Odi et amo.
The satirical poet Juvenal provides a vivid and unflattering, but not altogether impartial, picture of life in a Roman apartment block:
We live in a city supported mostly by slender props, which is how the bailiff patches cracks in old walls, telling the residents to sleep peacefully under roofs ready to fall down around them.
By the mid 4th century, there were 46,600 apartment blocks known as ‘insulae’ (islands), and only 1,790 ‘domus’ (villas) in Rome. Their heights, as well as their numbers, were something of a cause for concern; they continued rising higher and higher, even in spite of Trajan’s height restrictions of seven storeys.
At times, and places, wandering through Glasgow, I get to thinking of 4th century Rome.
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