Rome had urban sprawl before urban sprawl was cool.
I hear that ancient United States used to be pretty cool, too.
:’) The older part, the core of ancient Rome itself was a noisy, stinking, throbbing open wound; it had grown without building codes or zoning ordinances, unlike the nice neat grids the Romans used to build their colonial towns. The Roman Empire built template towns more or less like Walgreens builds template drug stores.
Early in the imperial period a law was passed prohibiting the use of carts during the daylight hours, because there wasn’t room for pedestrians and litter traffic as well as the carts. That meant that the carts — which delivered the many things needed by a city that size, every day — had to move at night, and the streets were paved with stone, so it was a massively loud town at night.
Ostia was Rome’s first conquest, and thanks to the burning of Rome by the Gauls, the archives were apparently lost, making the conquest of Ostia a prehistoric event, and generally dated to late 5th c BC, or 400 BC. The traditional foundation was in the 8th c, but there’s no known evidence for that.
Since the eastern half of the Roman Empire didn’t finally fall until the Turks took Constantinople, in 1453, the Roman Empire actually endured about 2000 years.
http://www.ostia-antica.org/
http://www.ostiaantica.beniculturali.it/en/scavi-ostia-antica.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostia_Antica
http://www.travelyesplease.com/travel-blog-ostia-antica/
http://travel.michelin.com/web/destination/Italy-Rome-Ostia_Antica
https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/read/articles/ostia-antica-near-rome