1 The Roman Street

You just left the "contemporary world" behind, you are now walking on one of the oldest Roman streets of Perugia. Any Roman town had two main streets: the cardo, running north to south, and the decumanus east to west. Where they crossed, right there was the very town center.

In Perugia the cardo still nowadays keeps its old position insofar as it has become Corso Vannucci, namely Main Street. (Pietro Vannucci was the Renaissance painter known as "Perugino," possibly Raphael's master.)

On the contrary, the decumanus cannot be found in the open air any longer. The stones you walk currently on belong to the second most important street in the Etruscan-then-Roman Era, precisely the decumanus.

This is a dark, still, underground place now. You should turn to imagination so as to envision it as one of the liveliest areas in the town, full of the noises of everyday life: the voices of the people, the squeak of cart wheels. . . the carts that had traveled along this street for centuries and left those grooves on the stones, the signs of the hubbub in the neighborhood right then. This kind of paving, called basolato, is often used to indicate the ancient Roman streets, basoli being the great stones used for the upper surface of the pavement (summum dorsum in Latin).

While envisioning this area "as was" in the open air, you should mentally delete the arches too. They are not as old as the street, in fact; they were Medieval props, and still support the buildings in the Saint Lawrence Island, especially the Canons' houses. The oldest – Etruscan, then Roman – trampling levels provided the layer upon which the following buildings were planned, until Perugia, layer by layer, acquired the look it currently has. During this process, in the 12th - 13th centuries the street and the whole area were buried.