Identification The architecture depicted in this fragment consists entirely of tabernae. The most common type of tabernae on the Plan, also seen in this fragment, consists of a single room that opens directly onto a street. This type of room could function as a shop, as a dwelling, or, probably more commonly, as a combination of the two. In single-room shops, a wooden loft often served as the actual dwelling area (Reynolds 1996, pp. 158-9). This fragment also depicts a type of taberna that had an additional room in the back. Such structures have been found in both Ostia and Pompeii. The back room was either used as the family residence or, if the front room had a loft, as a work and/or storage space. Other examples of such tabernae can be seen in frs. 11a, 11c, and 11fgh (Reynolds 1996, fig. 3.13). Although omitted in this fragment, there would have been doors between the front and the back rooms. No stairs are visible, suggesting these are single-storey buildings. The rhomboidal shape of the shops at top and bottom right indicates one of two things: either the area depicted was hilly and the surveyors had difficulty rendering the sloping architecture, or the fragment represent a section of the map where two different surveys merged and had to be tweaked in order to fit together.

Significance This fragment is typical of non-located fragments of the FUR. It depicts an area devoted to residential/commercial structures, and is thus visibly different from the center of Rome with its political and religious monuments. The crooked architecture vividly illustrates the problems associated with surveying and depicting the city's architecture.

Text by Tina Najbjerg