How Was Aosta Built

Aosta is a Roman plan that was never abandoned, which is rarer than it sounds.

The rectangle

The colony was laid out as a walled rectangle on a grid of ten by sixteen blocks, with towers at intervals and gates on each side. The modern streets follow those lines, and about two kilometres of wall survive, in places to full height.

The Porta Praetoria

The eastern gate stands complete: three arches, a courtyard between two gate lines, and about two and a half metres below the modern street, which is how much the city has risen in two thousand years.

The arch

The Arch of Augustus was raised just outside the walls in 25 BC to mark the conquest. Its slate roof is an eighteenth-century addition to keep the water out.

The theatre

What survives is the south facade, twenty-two metres of arcaded wall standing free, and the lower seating. It is the most photographed thing in the city and it is only a fragment of the building.

Sant'Orso

Under the later roof of the collegiate church, an eleventh-century Ottonian fresco cycle survives in the roof space because a vault was inserted beneath it. The cloister of 1133 carries forty capitals carved with scripture, animals and the life of Saint Ursus.

Lose and timber

Roofs here are slabs of local stone on heavy timber, laid to carry snow, and the pattern runs from the eighteenth-century arch shelter to the farmhouses of every side valley.

Megalithic ground

At Saint-Martin-de-Corléans, a Neolithic and Copper Age ritual site with standing stones, anthropomorphic stelae and ploughed ceremonial furrows lies preserved beneath a modern museum building, and predates the Romans by three thousand years.