La città immaginata. Raffigurazione e realtà urbana nella Grecia Classica

The urbanization of the Greek polis is a longue durée process and is implemented between the Archaism and the Late Classical Age. The first descriptions from the Greek world belong to non-Greek cities: Babylon, Nineveh, Ecbatana. On the contrary, the Greek culture offers an abstract image of the polis, related to the community rather than to the urban achievements; even in the fourth century, the theoretical cities of Plato presents themself as a social system and only consequently as a urban system. A new model of built and architectural city is known only for those cities that emerge from the close nature of the polis, the fifth century Athens or the great dynastic city foundations. From this phase a new vision of the city is fixed, as consequence of political or royal propaganda; this new course of ancient urban history produce a unfamiliar image of the walled city as ideological sign that the Late Antiquity and Middle Ages handed to modern Europe.