"The City Of Seven Hills": From Lisbon, Goa To Macau

The expansion of a city is also the process of conquering the highlands.From the seven hills of Rome to a large number of mountainous cities of the Roman empire,the idea of "constructing the city on the hill" has become a shared feature of most of theRoman cities,in the wake of the religious fanaticism of the Middle Ages,it gave rise to numerous "Cities upon a hill",making the buildings on the top of the hills become the"sacred place" closest to the heaven,and finally honored the city a special "crown" in theimages.During the Renaissance,this ideal was strongly strengthened in the "city of seven hills":Rome.After a series of urban redevelopments,a new holy city was established,standing on the ruins of the Sack of Rome,it not only became a model of many Italian cities,in the Age of Sea Power,the idea also expanded to the "edge" of the Mediterranean,got free in the Iberian Peninsula which have been through the Romanization,and finally developed a more adaptable and localized mountainous city pattern.However,different from the "The Second Rome" Constantinople in the fourth century,although those cities were usually bound up with the religious movement of the Holy See,they were more related to the country’s Maritime career.In Portugal,the capital Lisbon not only tended to nudge the Holy City with a series of plans of "Rome Reconstruction",but transformed itself into a "mountain city by thesea" where the lower town became the new core,thus to demonstrate the key impulse of the Age of Sea Power:transoceanic trade.In this process,the idea of the "localized"mountain city of Portugal was taken to the coasts and islands of the Indian Ocean,the strong power of the Holy See also penetrated in them through the royal court of Lisbon,and finally shaped the sea boundary of the empire with new cities surrounded by mountains.It was during this process,Goa was transformed into an Oriental Rome wit its absolute political and religious status.It not only echoed the first Rome of the Mediterranean,but made the idea of "building a city in the highlands" to arrive the Far East,with the complete constructions of the local hills and several adaption policies,Macau,the "land of the true cross",finally became a characterized Cidade do Nome deDeos de Macau.However,behind the "moving" of the holy city,was the urbanization process "fromthe mountains to the seashore" of the Romans,and under the trade situation "from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean" of the Age of Sea Power,it experienced the transformation of the "media" of the city construction,and in the process of adapting tothe mountains,plains,seashores and islands,moved from the classical world to the early modern society,finally turned the imagination of the "land of the true cross"(Macau)into the reality,at the "crossroads" where China met the world.