ROMAN ROADS AND ROMAN PARIS.

ROMAN ROADS AND ROMAN PARIS. Lee Bryant sent me a link to this wonderful site about what remains in Paris of the ancient Roman city. I posted here about how straight and severe the Roman roads were. This discussion of the Roman grid in Lutetia (ancient Paris) points out the the Roman planners ignored previous settlement patterns in laying out main streets of Lutetia to conform to a theoretical, strictly orthogonal town grid. The discussion notes the few deviations from the grid pattern because of peculiarities of the terrain. It appears that the location of the main road of Lutetia was a major reason why the Paris location was important to the Romans: “There is no evidence that this road existed under the Gauls, or even that there was another river crossing at Paris…..On both banks, other major roads joined up with it to take advantage of this crossing. Lutetia thus appears to have been a “bridge town” that took its place in the great Gallo-Roman road network.”