Scipio founded Italica close to an existing Iberian town of the Turdetani as a home for his veterans -- a mixture of Roman citizens and Italian allies called socii. The nearby city of Hispalis, the future Seville, was and would remain larger, but Italica's importance derived from its illustrious origin and its position near the Guadalquivir, close enough to control river traffic. The vetus urbs, the original city, was built on a Hippodamian grid with public buildings and a forum at the center, linked to a busy river port. Among the settlers were families of the gens Ulpia from the Umbrian city of Tuder and the gens Aelia from Hadria -- the ancestral lines that would eventually produce the Ulpi Traiani and Aelii Hadriani, the families of Rome's two greatest adoptive emperors.

When Hadrian became emperor, he lavished attention on his birthplace. He expanded the city northward as the nova urbs, the new city, and elevated it to the status of colonia -- Colonia Aelia Augusta Italica -- though he expressed surprise at the request, since it already enjoyed the rights of a municipium. He built the Traianeum, an enormous temple honoring his predecessor and adoptive father, occupying a double insula at the highest point of the new city. The temple precinct measured 108 by 80 meters, surrounded by a porticoed square with alternating rectangular and semicircular exedrae, and decorated with over a hundred columns of expensive Cipollino marble shipped from the Greek island of Euboea. The amphitheater he built was the third largest in the Roman Empire, surpassed only by the Colosseum and one other.

Italica began to decline as early as the 3rd century, undone not by invasion or civil war but by geology. The Guadalquivir shifted its course, leaving the city's river port stranded on dry ground while Hispalis, better positioned on the new channel, continued to grow. The cause was likely siltation -- the slow accumulation of sediment that follows deforestation, a widespread problem in antiquity. The city lingered through late antiquity, important enough to have its own bishop and to maintain a garrison during the Visigothic age. Leovigildo restored its walls in 583 AD. But Italica's greatness was finished, and the slow process of quarrying its stones for other purposes had already begun.

For centuries, Italica served as a convenient source of building materials. In 1740, Seville ordered the amphitheater's walls demolished to build a dam on the Guadalquivir. In 1796, the vetus urbs was cannibalized for the new Camino Real of Extremadura. The first legal protection came, ironically, from Napoleon's occupying government in 1810, which reinstated the ancient name and allocated a budget for excavation. Because no modern city was built over the nova urbs, Italica is unusually well preserved: cobbled Roman streets, mosaic floors still in situ, and houses with names that evoke their decorative programs -- the House of the Birds, the House of the Planetarium, the House of the Neptune Mosaic. A 37-kilometer aqueduct, extended under Hadrian, fed a huge cistern at the city's edge that remains intact. Declared a National Monument by Royal Order in 1912, Italica is the rare Roman city where you can walk the original streets and see the mosaics exactly where their makers placed them.