High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building (opens in new tab)

I can highly recommend Lindsey Davis' Falco series, murder mysteries set in Ancient Rome. She brings the city to life, it's remarkably vivid, and -- I promise this comment is on topic for this thread! -- Roman apartment living is threaded throughout the series and apartment building construction even forms a major plot point in one book.

I can't say more without spoilers. Excellent for "feeling" what Rome was like.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/42173-marcus-didius-falco

For thousands of years, people have seen the benefits of living in cities.What is really a city? Simply a place where people have a mutual interest in living close to each other. Urban sprawl and car centric society seems to be a really bad idea. Build better cities rather than self driving cars.

  See how pots strike and dint the sturdy pavement.

  There’s death from every window where you move.

  You’d be a fool to venture out to dine,

  oblivious of what goes on above,

  without your having penned that dotted line,

  of your last testament.

This feels very modern. "Sure, you might get randomly killed by a pot flying out a window, but there are _walkable_ restaurants!"

I really really wish, there was a VR game/app where I can transport myself to different places/times in the past and just walk around to get the texture and feel for what it felt like living in that time.

Walking around a Roman town, hearing what people talked like, what they wore, what technology was around, what did they do most of the day.

Someone please make it real.

I really enjoyed the film Fellini Satyricon because it shows a couple of regular guys on a crazy adventure after their apartment building in Rome collapses in an earthquake. Most other stuff about Rome/Romans follows leaders, generals, aristocrats, etc. so it was refreshing to see regular people.

And completely not based on reality, I also liked the British comedy series Plebs that also follows regular people living Rome. But it's just a way to show modern issues satirically, not really historical.

One of Mary Beard's documentaries ('Meet the Romans' I think) touches on Roman insulae. Literal death traps, and seemingly miserably uncomfortable at the best of times. At least you're out of the rain (except on the top floors).

And someone below mentioned 'Plebs', which is the humorous take on all this. Recommended.

They called them insulae meaning "islands". They had no concept of fire escapes, and barely any plumbing (despite this image of Roman engineering). They really were the harris end of Roman architecture.

Another article written by Al