Note preliminari dalle nuove indagini nel Quartiere del Pretorio di Gortina (Creta)

The study of the Pretorio’s area of Gortyn, where the Italian excavations have continued for more than a century from the early 1900s to the present day, has always represented a turning point in the study for the reconstruction of the image of the ancient city landscape. The area, with a public character since the Hellenistic age, continued to fulfill this function and began to take forms suitable for an increasingly central role in the political, administrative and legal organization of the city as early as the middle of the fourth century AD. Numerous restoration interventions starting from 330 and culminating under the empire of Graziano, Valentiniano and Teodosio, which ended only with Heraclius, involved the entire public baths complex and the structures adjacent to it. These numerous interventions could not be considered isolated expressions, but the result of an organic program of transformations capable of radically changing the function of the area of the Sanctuary of Apollo Pizio. The analysis of the data derived from the comparison between the appropriately characterized planimetric architectural survey and the published data of the Italian archaeological missions involved in different sectors of the area, as well as the participation in the research conducted by Professor Enzo Lippolis in the so-called Isolato del Ninfeo and allow a series of preliminary observations on the Praetorium Complex, since when and in what forms it arose was constructed.