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Wayfinding in the Roman City: A Subaltern Spatial Modality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2025
Abstract
The wayfinding theory of Kevin Lynch, this article proposes, lays bare an underappreciated spatial modality deployed by inhabitants and visitors to the Roman city based on street-view navigation of the city’s legible topographical elements, ranging from natural to built features of the environment. In particular, wayfinding is positioned as a primarily non-elite and sub-elite – or subaltern – spatial modality that elites may have been aware of, but rarely had to make use of in their movement through the city. A survey of a diverse set of epigraphic corpora – graffiti, enslaving collars, dipinti, curse tablets, brick stamps, tesserae, and epitaphs – instead demonstrates the pervasive role of wayfinding across many aspects of subaltern Roman life, especially in connection to the practical conduct of business, and how this spatial modality was entangled in several matrices of domination. Ultimately, the theoretical lens of wayfinding should encourage us to reorient our approaches to the topography of Rome away from elite productions of cartography and towards subaltern, street-level conceptions of the space of the urbs.
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