Calle Itálica

The name travels south, to the outskirts of present-day Santiponce, in the Guadalquivir valley near Seville. There, in 206 BC, the general Publius Cornelius Scipio settled his wounded veterans after the battle of Ilipa and raised Italica, the first Roman city in Hispania and the first Rome founded beyond the Italian peninsula. The city grew into a cradle of emperors. From Italic families came Trajan, the first Caesar born in a province, and after him Hadrian, who heaped honours on his homeland and enlarged it with the so-called Nova Urbs, a monumental quarter of wide streets, baths and temples. Of that splendour the amphitheatre, the mosaics and the paved streets remain. Calle Itálica belongs to Nueva España, laid out in the twentieth century over former estates north of the Castellana. A name two thousand years old for a strip of asphalt not yet a hundred.