The New Historia YouTube channel edited together an animated flythrough of ancient Rome, and it’s stunning. It gives you a look at what a well-managed, pre-industrial urban environment would look like: Orderly public spaces, no vehicle pollution, no factory smokestacks belching smoke, no buildings blocking the sun, no billboards, no advertisements, no electricity.

Here’s the video:

What’s amusing is the provenance of the footage–it was apparently extracted from Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series of videogames. So it is accurate? I have no idea; while the company famously consulted with Egyptologists to recreate Egypt for their Assassin’s Creed: Origins game, I couldn’t find any mention of them working with historians on Rome. But I’d like to believe it looked like this.

via BoingBoing