History and topology

My chairman is Italian and grew up in Sicily. I recently sent him a link to an article about the organization of Centuripe, a Sicilian town that goes back to the 5th Century BCE. Here was his reply:

"Ancient urban architecture was based on the principle of minimizing distances from a focus (castle, city hall, church, etc). When you apply this principle on a flat surface, you get concentric expansion as seen in the centers of cities like Milan, Bologna, Florence and Rome. When you can only expand in one direction, you get a distorted semicircle like Napoli, Catania and Palermo. When the surface is not flat, the expansion takes whatever shape allowed to minimize distances, hence Genova and your example of Centuripe.

"You may want to take a look at Enna, near Centuripe. It was an important military outpost of the Roman Empire chosen for its central location from where they could dispatch troops to any corner of the island within the same amount of time. Basically, most of the Roman army in Sicily was in this central location because somebody managed to "measure" distances in time units rather than miles back then. Because of that, Enna controlled the trade of wheat to the entire peninsula when Sicily was the granary of the Roman Empire. So, the topological importance of "center points", in time and space, was well known to our ancestors and it still amazes me how they could figure things out with no satellites."