Italy · 3rd century
The Aurelian Walls (Italian: Mura aureliane) are a line of city walls built between AD 271 and AD 275 in Rome, Italy, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Aurelian. They superseded the earlier Servian Wall built during the 4th century BC.
The walls enclosed all the seven hills of Rome plus the Campus Martius and, on the right bank of the Tiber, the Trastevere district. The river banks within the city limits appear to have been left unfortified, although they were fortified along the Campus Martius. The size of the entire enclosed area is 1,400 hectares (3,500 acres). The wall cut through populated areas: in reality the city at the time embraced 2,400 hectares (5,900 acres). Pliny the Elder in the first century AD suggested that the densely populated areas, extrema tectorum ("the limits of the roofed areas") extended 2.8 kilometres (1.7 mi) from the Golden Milestone in the Forum (Natural History 3.67).
Text adapted from “Aurelian Walls” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Aurelian Walls ranks #99 of 9,079 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #9 of the 560 mapped in Italy. Founded 271, it is older than 97% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 29 atlas entries founded in the 3rd century. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 24,588 times in the last 60 days, more than 98% of the atlas. 65 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Rome, 3 km away. See how Italy compares in the castle statistics.
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