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Well into the seventh century, masons in Rome built bonded-masonry walls using materials and techniques directly descended from antiquity. But walls erected starting in the eighth century are very different and distinctively ‘medieval’. The late seventh / early eighth century therefore represents a moment of rapid transition or even rupture in the Roman building industry, when older ways of doing things ceased forever. Drawing on recently excavated structures on the Palatine and at San Paolo fuori le Mura that offer new insights into this crucial transitional period, I suggest that the break with centuries-old building traditions reflects a fundamental shift in mechanisms of patronage, and of control over the city's built environment. After a hiatus in the second half of the seventh century, when the Roman construction industry languished between a Byzantine administration in decline and a Church bureaucracy not yet empowered to supplant it, early eighth-century popes faced the challenge of creating anew the means and methods to build on a substantial scale. The newly excavated structures of the early eighth century offer an unexpected perspective on the growth of, and the growing pains experienced by, Rome's nascent papal government.

Like the Greek word πλατεῖα from which it derives, the Latin platea originally designated a wide, continuous street, generally one of the main through roads in a city, in which sense it is already well attested in the second and first centuries BC. 1 From the first century AD, πλατεῖα/platea commonly denoted the especially grandiose avenues, usually flanked on both sides with more or less continuous porticoes, which were just then establishing themselves as defining features of Mediterranean cityscapes. One of the earliest was the platea at Antioch, whose flanking colonnades were erected beginning probably in the late first century BC; the grandest of all was the main street at Alexandria, one hundred feet (30.5 m) wide and some 5 km long, known simply as "the πλατεῖα," both sides of which were embellished with monumental colonnades by the second century AD. By late antiquity, such porticated thoroughfares were ubiquitous in the leading cities of the eastern Mediterranean and had made substantial inroads in the West too. 2 These grand avenues were at once the most frequented and the most symbolically pregnant of late-antique urban spaces, primary foci of commerce, commemoration, and ceremony, which not coincidentally also attracted a disproportionate share of the most ambitious architectural interventions attempted by both lay and ecclesiastical patrons. Further, as I have recently tried to show, many urban collectives continued to gravitate around a central platea inherited from late antiquity well into the Middle Ages in both East and West. These privileged urban corridors framed and channeled the movements of travelers and pilgrims; of locals going about their daily business; and of both resident and visiting dignitaries, lay and ecclesiastical, who routinely chose such relatively monumental routes as the backdrop for the ceremonial processions that most ostentatiously and memorably proclaimed the majesty of their rank and the prestige of the institutions they represented. 3 In topographical, functional, and ceremonial terms alike, something