The Roman economy continues to draw scholarly interest following decades of sustained attention, especially regarding the trade and communication that both enabled and were made possible by the consolidation of empire—and for good reason. Deciphering the success of Rome’s urban centers, its per capita growth, and the overall impact of its structures and institutions depends on understanding to what extent and how different communities were tied together economically. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches have been championed, but the latter have recently assumed an outsized role thanks to massive ceramic and other datasets fit for exploitation. James Page’s volume adds to this mounting evidence for a connected Roman landscape, one that extends far beyond the Mediterranean coasts that have to date received most attention.
Page aims to explore the extent to which varied regions of Northern Italy were integrated into Roman trade through analysis of the logistical systems underpinning the import and export of goods. The author focuses particularly on the relationship between costs of transportation and availability of goods between the late Republic and late antiquity. The utility of this landscape as a case study lies in its extensive riverine and road networks. Complementing this multi-modal transportation is a multi-material dataset comprising three major categories of traceable imports—amphoras, finewares, and decorative stone—as well as the more challenging evidence of regional exports. The catalogued objects, however, are marked by varying date ranges and need not have been subject to the same mechanisms or pathways of distribution. Statistical probabilities therefore help Page resolve the long or nebulous chronologies that characterize bulk artifacts at this scale. Clustering analysis then provides clues about likely correlations between consumption (and import) patterns. These datasets and methodologies are presented in the introduction and supported by two appendices.
Two chapters offer background on transport infrastructure and agricultural productivity across this diverse region. A deep dive into the networks of roads and rivers reveals a wider role for each than often assumed and suggests that these did not compete but rather formed an integrated system. Riverine transport has long been deemed the best general option for inland movement, yet the navigability of the Po has frequently been discounted without deeper engagement with the obstacles and affordances presented by flow and topography. A review of this evidence, synthesized with archaeological traces of boats and barges, suggests more passable routes than previously suspected. Major centers were generally not more than 15 km from some navigable waterway. Given Northern Italy’s topography of marshes and mountains, roads and bridges played key roles in both the historically attested major thoroughfares and the smaller paths that linked local communities. But Page rightly pushes beyond spatial coverage, exploring how road design, condition, and gradient would have allowed or disallowed certain forms of carriage: this comes through most obviously in the limitations presented by the sloping approaches to the Alps and the crossing of the Apennines. Tying these together were various canals and ports created and carefully maintained to help enhance and link the components of infrastructure to each other and to routes through the Adriatic and Ligurian seas to the Roman world beyond.
Northern Italy’s extraordinary productivity serves as the focus of the following chapter, which offers a chance also to ascertain the potential for export. Among the most important products were clearly wine and cereals, but local pork, textiles, and finewares also found their way in bulk to Rome, the rest of Italy, and certain other parts of the empire. Page gathers considerable evidence for products that, by virtue of manufacturing infrastructure and scale, left durable markers on the landscape. Yet the vectors by which these goods—with their different needs and challenges—moved along the complex multi-model transport network from the previous chapter are more difficult to trace. For example, more and more varied local goods reached Adriatic than Ligurian ports, suggesting this was the more important maritime outlet, but how the different Adriatic ports actually collected and transshipped these remains obscured by the regional data’s spatial resolution. The suggestions offered by Page may be reasonable, but they currently lack analytical testing.
By contrast, the record of imports allows a finer lens to be brought to the quantities and paths into Northern Italy over the next three chapters dealing with, in turn, amphoras, finewares, and decorative stone. No doubt most quantitatively significant of these are the amphoras, which peak in the early empire—the period for which data is generally most robust—before trailing off over the centuries that follow. Cluster analysis offers an opportunity to explore similarity in patterns of import origins among sites and, potentially, related networks behind their supply that produced, as Page describes them, “zones of consumption” (70). For sites on the Adriatic coast, the largest group of imports generally came from along this sea, a reminder that even in a maritime setting with relatively cheap transport and wide availability of goods, nearby regions still played the central role in everyday supply. While it is hardly surprising to see a drop of Adriatic types as one moves inland, certain imports, like those from the eastern Mediterranean, actually grow in prevalence, hinting at particular dynamics that overruled basic transportation costs in these markets.
Finewares, often considered secondary cargo accompanying bulk agricultural and other goods, offer another line of material evidence. Again, short-haul movements of regional production satisfied most needs here early on, itself an important testimony to the power of local goods even when transportation costs weighed less heavily. More interesting still, though, is the prevalence of Gaulish and central Italian imports at sites situated toward the western edges of the study area. Enabled by their greater portability, the direct overland movement of these finewares across mountains stands in marked contrast to the amphoras distributed by water and suggests more than simple “piggyback” trade. With the decline of nearby sources, later centuries see the geographic network expand, especially to North Africa, to fill the supply gap.
Another perspective on Northern Italy’s import networks comes through its consumption of decorative stone, the dataset for which is more limited but still highly valuable. Both public and private elite building programs ensured that stone would move as a luxury good despite its weight and logistical challenges, raising the prospect of more specialized mechanisms of exchange. Generally similar patterns and cost limitations, though, are once again evident in distribution, with larger volumes of imported stone along the Adriatic giving way quickly, as one moves west through the valley, to smaller volumes and, eventually, to alternative nearby sources. Larger pieces like columns and other architectural elements seem severely limited in their reach inland; more portable and cost-effective revetment, often in quite varied assemblages, comprises the overwhelming majority of imports into the valley. Even so, the fact that, among imported stone, various sources in Asia Minor and North Africa were favored over closer ones within the Adriatic—the reverse of the situation with amphora-borne goods—speaks clearly to the limits of a purely transport cost-focused model of consumption.
There can be no doubt that both coastal and inland regions of Northern Italy were well-connected to larger Mediterranean networks. Page draws these threads together in a final chapter, although the clustering exercise aimed at defining consumption groups across the data may be better understood in relative terms of similarities of material practices. The integration of this multi-modal transport network seems on sound footing, even if one suspects that the shifting of cargos this would entail between ships, barges, carts, and donkeys—each bringing delays, fees, and additional labor—may be underestimated in favor of more linear distance-based costs. One can imagine a scenario where it may have been cheaper or more efficient simply to load goods arriving at a seaport onto a cart and keep them in that same mode all the way to a destination rather than undertaking multiple re-loadings involving river barges and the like. Yet even without these specific clusters or additional transfer expenses, the effects of transportation systems on regional economic patterning are clear. They reveal gravitational pulls of varying strengths from the Adriatic coast for most, and from the Ligurian coast (or, in the case of finewares, across the Alps) for some along the western edges of the study area. This correlation adds weight and nuance to the assertion, long recognized but rarely so systematically tested, that transportation was a key factor in Roman economics.
Perhaps more intriguing than such correlation, though, is where observed patterns diverge from cost models, and where more qualitative factors reveal themselves as less explicable through purely quantitative methods. Page’s case study in the southwest of the Po Valley offers a handy example. The models suggest that goods were still relatively cheaply transported upriver from the Adriatic, yet some communities here seem more tightly connected over the Apennines to Liguria. Perhaps proximity created social dynamics and market conditions that favored shared taste among neighbors despite the availability of slightly cheaper options from more distant centers. Page gestures in such directions, which will require future finer-grained analysis into local contexts of consumption. There may be no hard-and-fast rule to where goods stop moving when the need is to express shared cultural identity or to participate in a Mediterranean urban lifestyle. The gravitational pull of wealthy city centers may also require more focus. To what extent, for example, might the diffusion of diverse imports have been guided by relative population sizes and purchasing powers of different centers around this “richest district”?
Page’s volume has brought together robust data for Northern Italy and offered another path forward toward more systematic analysis of the interactions that tied together Rome’s empire. If we can ask still more questions about taste and urban pull, about transfer logistics and multiscalar movement, and if we can explore qualitative factors that intersected with these transport costs, it is because of efforts like Page’s to gather such rich and informative datasets.