In old Rome buildings collapsed all the time. They were too tall for their base and the walls were too thin. Hear that distant rumble? That’s another rickety building going down somewhere in the City.
According to a census of buildings made at the time of Septimius Severus the usual city block (insula) was around 300 square meters—hardly broad enough to carry a structure twenty meters high, which was a typical height by then—three or four stories of shaky construction. Greedy builders found ways of thinning the walls by adding rows of bricks to strengthen the concrete or the adobe; and they kept pushing skyward.
The poet Juvenal lived in a tipsy third-floor apartment but he had neighbors who had to climb higher to reach home. “Who at cool Praeneste, or at Volsinii amid its leafy hills,” he whined,” was ever afraid of his house tumbling down?….But here we inhabit a city propped up for the most part by slats: for that is how the landlord patches up the crack in the old wall, asking the boarders to sleep peacefully under the ruin that hangs above their heads.”
Augustus was so alarmed by the frequent collapse of buildings that he issued an edict forbidding private citizens to construct an edifice higher than twenty meters. But buildings kept growing tall and keeling over. A hundred years later Trajan in desperation tried reducing the legal height to eighteen meters but he could not buck the greedy builders or the need for more housing.
By the fourth century Rome was world-famous for her tall buildings—many were five and six stories high.
And one skyscraper towered above them all: the legendary INSULA OF FECULA. That monstrosity was an apartment building so tall that it became a tourist attraction, like Trajan’s Column and the Pantheon. No one knows just how tall it was or how it met its end. Maybe a storming Visigoth toppled it with a swat of his sword.
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