Insula (building)

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In Roman architecture, an insula (Latin for "island", pl.: insulae) was one of two things: either a kind of apartment building, or a city block. This article deals with the former definition, that of a type of apartment building. Insulae housed most of the urban citizen population of ancient Rome's massive population ranging from 800,000 to 1 million inhabitants in the early imperial period. Residents of an insula included ordinary people of lower- or middle-class status (the plebeians) and all but the wealthiest from the upper-middle class (the equites). The traditional elite and the very wealthy lived in a domus, a large single-family residence, but the two kinds of housing were intermingled in the city and not segregated into separate neighbourhoods. The ground-level floor of the insula was used for tabernae, shops and businesses, with living spaces above. Like modern apartment buildings, an insula might have a name, usually referring to the owner of the building. The owners of these...

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