I luoghi di sosta: funzioni, spazi, contesti

Late antique itineraries and juridical sources show that both the Roman road system and the related post stations network was still in function in Late Antiquity. Roads and stations were primarily used by public officers travelling under the aegis of cursus publicus, but literary sources confirm that they were used also by private people, travelling for different purposes. Many different words (mansio, stathmos, statio, mutatio, deversorium, praetorium etc.) indicate the places used by travellers for resting and, if the case, for changing horses, pack- and draught-animals. Unfortunately, this relative abundance of written sources is not paralleled by a similar amount of archaeological data, since the archaeological research agenda focused on “minor” settlements located along the roads just recently. While many smaller or larger archaeological sites located along the streets have been tentatively recognised as places associated with post station functions, mainly on the basis of toponomastic, we still lack a proper research framework to archaeologically identifiyng such a function. A more or less close relationship with a road pathway, the presence of a large paved courtyard surrounded by stables and warehouses, the existence of a bath or a larger, isolated, thermal complex seem to be assumed as possible archaeological indicators of a site that performed the function of resting place, may be in association with other function as well. Despite of the difficulty in precisely identifying the place and the tipology of any single part of the system, the road stations network can be assumed in the whole as a very interesting study case for an experiment of contextual archaeology, intended to evaluate the role that those settlements had into the scenery of the overall transformation of the landscapes and the settlement patterns in Late Antiquity.