This town-plan of Naples differs from any of those noted above. Its blocks are narrower than those in any Italian town, unless in Modena, and while they resemble the 'insulae' of the sixth region of Pompeii (fig. 13), are far more regular than those. Almost the only close parallel is that of Roman Carthage (fig. 24). As Naples was by origin and character a Greek city, these narrow oblongs have been supposed to represent a Greek arrangement. They do not, however, correspond to anything that is known in the Greek lands, either of the Macedonian or of any earlier period. The conclusion is difficult to avoid that this Greek city of Naples adopted an Italian street-scheme, but laid it out with more scientific regularity than the early Italians themselves. When this occurred and why, is wholly unknown. That the result is not an unpractical form of building is shown by the fact that similar long and narrow house-blocks are a characteristic feature of modern Liverpool, though they seldom occur in other English towns, unless intermixed with square and other blocks. CHAPTER VIII ROMAN PROVINCIAL TOWN-PLANS. I The provinces, and above all the western provinces of the Roman Empire, tell us even more than Italy about Roman town-planning. But they tell it in another way. They contain many towns which were founded full-grown, or re-founded and at the same time rebuilt, and which were in either case laid out on the Roman plan. But the modern successors of these towns have rarely kept the network of their ancient streets in recognizable detail. Though walls, gates, temples, baths, palaces, amphitheatres still stand stubbornly erect amidst a flood of modern dwellings, they are but the islands which mark a submerged area. The paths and passages by which men once moved across that area have vanished beneath the waves and cannot be recovered from any survey of these visible fragments. There is hardly one modern town in all the European and African provinces of the Roman Empire which still uses any considerable part of its ancient street-plan. In our own country there is no single case. In Gaul and Germany, two or three streets in Cologne and one or two in Trier are the sole survivals.[87] In Illyricum there is no example unless possibly at Belgrade. In the Spanish peninsula the town of Braga in northern Portugal seems to stand alone. In Roman Africa--Tunis, Algiers and Morocco--no instance has survived the Arab conquest.[88] [87] For Orange see p. 107. Nîmes may possibly retain one or two streets of the Roman Nemausus, but it is very doubtful; see Menard's map of 1752. See further in general p. 142. [88] Though, curiously enough, the chess-board pattern of field divisions has survived in the neighbourhood of Carthage.