CENTURIAZIONE E GEOGRAFIA FISICA: TRA TEORIA E PRASSI. PIANIFICAZIONE TERRITORIALE E GESTIONE DELLE ACQUE ALLA PROVA DI UN AMBIENTE NATURALE DINAMICO. L’ESEMPIO DELLA PIANURA PADANA

Roman centuriation is known thanks to the texts of the Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum, which contains some theoretical norms, and thanks to the tracks that we can observe in several parts of Italy and of the Mediterranean world. The Pianura Padana is a place where we could find very good examples of centuriation and where we can analyze the relationship between the theory and the real praxis. How did Romans manage a dynamic landscape like the floodplains? How did they balance the geometry of the centuriation and the environmental transformation? This article takes some cases from the Pianura Padana to examine which solutions were applied to reclaim new land and to control rivers. We can see that the geometric character of the centuriation is less rigid than we thought and the application of the theoretical norms is flexible and respects the physical geography. So we can observe that in a centuriated landscape there were wetlands and small marshes or woodlands and that there were also specific solutions to manage rivers and their natural evolution when it was impossible to control them completely.