La Roma senza città

The article, which deals with the asylum, the hospitium and the pater familias in the archaic age of Rome, starts from the reading of a recent book by Umberto Vincenti, focused on the idea that early Rome was a common institution, a legal reality before an urban one, a sort of league between the villages of the hills that, over time, became progressively more united, strong and extended, thus ending up absorbing the local powers and the reges of the mountains until arriving at the organic City and the single rex and that was very residually called ‘urbs’ in the sense of ‘inhabitants of the city’ and ‘population’, preferring instead to call it ‘civitas’, in the meaning of an entity very distinct from the urban aggregate where people lived, so that the urbs would have been an entity distinct from the civitas. And, from here, the hypothesis that Rome was born before the City, or rather without the City.