Tarragona: stratifications of the urban fabric on the Roman preexistences

The proposed theme is the result of the research carried out with the activities of the Thesis Laboratory, coordinated by the Professor M. Ieva, in the dICAR Department of the University Polytechnic of Bari. The study deepens the urban structure of Tarragona, city of Spain, and tries to explain how to run over the ancient planned substratum in the current aggregative and building system. Remember that Tarragona, the first Roman colony outside of Italy as early as 218 B.C., was born as a military camp in the high part next to the sea. After becoming the capital of the Hispania Citerior Tarraconensis province and seat of the Consilium Provinciae Hispaniae Citerioris in 73 A.C., under the emperor Vespasiano, it is endowed with a very extensive Provincial Forum that lies on the natural difference in level, using the morphology of the ground to organize three different levels: the enclosure of the imperial cult, the forensic square and the circus. The survey, performed with the typical tools of typological analysis, involves the examination of the urban fabric settled on the Roman substratum of the imperial age and the reconstruction of the subsequent transformations caused by clogging processes and specialization of the types within the walls. The collection of the cartography and the main historical-documentary sources, the results of the archaeological excavations and above all the study of the plans of the ground floors and the type-floors of a large part of the built, produced by the local administration, formed the necessary base to start the work presented here which proposes, as indicated, to elaborate a reconstructive hypothesis of the phases of formation of the urban fabric of the walled city, reconstructing the recent transformations and the hierarchies that have modified, over time, the organic relationships of the entire urban system. The scalar analysis (urban organism, urban fabric, building type) will help to explain urban evolution, through the investigation of the characteristics of basic and specialized construction and their diachronic mutations from which it is possible, in many cases, to clarify the spontaneous phenomena that occurred to modify the orderly structure of a previous planning.