Between heaven and earth. Town planning and the urban image of the Late Archaic Etruscan city of Kainua-Marzabotto

Closely connected to the sacred rules of the Etrusca Disciplina, the planning of urban space represents one of the most interesting aspects of the Etruscan culture. From this purely religious perspective, the town’s form and rigorous zoning became expressions of the divine, who guided human actions to define the perimeter and the principal axes of the settlement according to the transposition of the particular geometry of the templum celeste from the sky to the ground. These aspects can be observed in their complexity only in the city plan of Kainua-Marzabotto, an exceptionally well preserved colonial town (re)founded at the end of the sixth century BCE along one of the many Apennine pass between Tyrrhenian Etruria and the Po Valley. Through the presentation of new data deriving from metrological analysis recently conducted on the urban plan of the Late Archaic city of Marzabotto, this paper aims to examine the interaction between ritual practice and urban planning in order to reconstruct the original proportions of each element of the urban grid and the architectural landscape of the town, as well as define its borders that are currently not completely known. The image of a new foundation settlement emerges that was planned through a careful survey of the land and characterized by an urban system designed on a geometric-proportional basis using a linear unit equal to the Attic foot of 29.6 cm.