Reshaping civic space: some remarks on the transformations of the towns of Roman Sicily in the late Republic and early Empire

Recent scholarship pointed out how the towns of Sicily experienced wide urbanisticand architectural transformations during the Hellenistic period. After the long debateon the chronology of the phenomena of material growth and dense urbanizationshown by the archaeological record, that previously had been assigned exclusively tothe Early Hellenistic period, it’s now generally accepted that several cities, especially inNorth-Western Sicily, reshaped their urban panoplia after the Roman conquest of theisland, in the 2nd-1st centuries B.C., renovating extensively both civic and private buildings.Less known are the further transformations of the urban landscape between thelate Republican and early Imperial times, because of the gaps of the evidence and thelimited attention payed to this by the historians and the archaeologists. The paper aimsto explore such evolution of the urban landscape through some examples (Segesta,Solunto, Halaesa, Agrigento, Tyndaris), trying to pinpoint tendencies, agents and purposesthat lay behind the different achievements.