Porta Urbica Occidentale

At the western edge of the old town, a curious architectural palimpsest: Porta Urbica Occidentale, a Roman city gate now folded into a later residential block. The ancient gate survives as a round-arched passage, built entirely of stone blocks and topped with a barrel vault, its sturdy form still legible through the later additions. Around and above it, a polygonal-plan building of two or more storeys, rendered in plastered stone, rises with a pitched roof. Within this composite structure are nine dwellings and a carriage house, the medieval and modern simply building around the Roman, preserving it by incorporation rather than demolition. It is a characteristically Italian solution: the old never quite replaced, but absorbed, adapted, lived with. The gate no longer guards the road; it guards the memory of the road, a quiet stone ghost in a wall of apartments.

Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.