153. The cities and populations of Northern Epirus in the Roman era

As we all know, the archaeological investigation of a city has always been an issue of great interest for antiquity scholars and it represents one of the traditional research topics of the archaeologists at the University of Bologna, in particular in the mid-Adriatic area. Thanks to the research lead by Sandro De Maria, the interest of the University of Bologna over the last fifteen years has begun to focus more and more on Epirus and in particular on Phoinike. Along with the current digs at this site also many studies of this area have been carried out in order to place this capital city of Epirus in a wider context and to compare its historic parabola with that of other neighboring centers. Here we will try to focus our attention on a few towns of northern Epirus in an extremely preliminary manner, with the aim of presenting the problems, rather than the solutions, to our colleagues. Many of the considerations expressed herein are the result of a constant debate among the members of the Archaeological Mission in Phoinike, led by Sandro De Maria and by Shpresa Gjongekaj. For this reason I will need to share any eventual praise with them, but I take full responsibility for the less convincing hypotheses. The studies of my friend Julian Bogdani frees us from having to examine this topic in relation to the Hellenistic Age and thus allows us to concentrate on the Roman Age of northern Epirus, which corresponds to the territory of ancient Chaonia where the cities of Phoinike, Hadrianopolis and Buthrotum were located