Palestrina, Lazio

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In Palestrina, World War II bombs cleared enough medieval rubble to expose something the town itself had forgotten. Beneath the streets lay a vast terraced sanctuary dedicated to a Roman goddess, preserved under the medieval city for centuries. This hillside comune in Lazio sits about 35 km east of Rome, connected to the capital by the ancient Via Prenestina. Its modern population numbers around 22,000. But beneath that modest present runs one of the most layered civic histories in central Italy.

  The ancient city was called Praeneste. It was already wealthy and powerful in the 7th century BC, when Rome was still consolidating its grip on the surrounding Latin towns. Praeneste grew rich enough and proud enough to become Rome's most hated rival. It was razed and salted by papal order, rebuilt, destroyed again, and eventually absorbed by a dynasty that treated it as a private principality. What made this particular rocky hill worth so much violence? And what did all that violence keep uncovering?

  52

• 2. Ancient Praeneste

  ›

  The princely Barberini and Bernardini tombs, excavated in 1855, startled their discoverers with the richness of what lay inside. Silver cups, silver-gilt vessels, gold and amber jewellery, and ivory articles were found alongside the dead. Their quality matched the finest objects from the cemeteries of Etruscan Caere, the city now known as Cerveteri. The cups and jewellery were Phoenician, possibly Carthaginian, in origin. But the bronzes and much of the ivory pointed toward Etruscan craftsmanship. Praeneste in the 7th century BC was already a meeting point of eastern Mediterranean trade and Etruscan culture.

  Ancient mythology connected the origin of Praeneste to figures including Caeculus, Telegonus, Erulus, and Praenestus. The name itself probably derives from Praenesteus, meaning a place that overlooks. Early burials confirm the site was occupied by at least the 8th century BC. The earliest settlement was probably a citadel on the hilltop, ringed by cyclopean walls, some of which remain visible today. Two walls of the same period descended the slopes toward the town below.

  The most remarkable object to survive from the pre-Roman centuries is the Ficoroni Cista, a bronze box dated to 350-330 BC. Found in 1738, it is now kept at the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome. It is masterfully engraved with scenes showing the Argonauts arriving in Bithynia and Pollux defeating Amycus. Its archaic Latin inscription names both maker and recipient: "Novios Plautios Romai med fecid / Dindia Macolnia fileai dedit." The words translate as: "Novios Plautios made me in Rome, Dindia Macolnia gave me to her daughter." Objects like it are unique in Italy. Yet mirrors of the same style appear widely across Etruria, pointing to an Etruscan workshop operating in or near Praeneste itself. Other imported objects in these same burials show that Praeneste traded not only with Etruria but with the Greek east.

  125

• 3. Rome's Bitter Rival

  ›

  According to Livy, whose account provides the earliest historical record of Praeneste by name, the city withdrew from the Latin League in 499 BC. The Latin League had bound the Latin towns together from the 8th century BC for protection against the Etruscans. After withdrawing, Praeneste allied with Rome and helped defeat thirty Latin states at the Battle of Lake Regillus.

  That alliance did not hold. After Gauls under Brennus sacked Rome in 390 BC, Praeneste seized the moment to resist Roman expansion and switched sides. From 373-370 BC it was in near-continuous conflict with Rome or Rome's allies and was eventually defeated by the commander Cincinnatus.

  In the Latin War of 340-338 BC, Praeneste fought with the Latin rebels against Rome. After their defeat, part of the city's territory was confiscated. It became an allied city under a treaty called a foedus aequum. This arrangement permitted Roman exiles to live in Praeneste, a provision that brought the city added prosperity. In the Social War of 90 BC, Rome offered Praeneste full Roman citizenship. The city was made a municipium, a concession Rome needed to secure necessary alliances.

  In 82 BC, during the civil war between Sulla and his opponents, Gaius Marius was blockaded inside Praeneste by Sulla's forces. When the city fell, Marius killed himself. The male inhabitants were massacred in cold blood. Sulla established a military colony on part of the territory. An inscription records that he delegated the founding of that colony to Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus, consul in 73 BC. The founding was likely preceded by proscriptions and property confiscations. The large domus rebuilt in the following decades may have belonged to families destroyed by Sulla. Those new houses featured peristyles and mosaic floors, with a wall technique called opus reticulatum gradually replacing the older opus incertum.

  325

• 4. The Emperors' Escape

  ›

  Under the Empire, the breezes blowing off the Monti Prenestini turned Praeneste into a fashionable retreat from Rome's summer heat. The poet Horace ranked "cool Praeneste" alongside Tibur and Baiae as among the finest resorts of his era. Wealthy Romans built villas across the surrounding hills. Those same visitors reportedly mocked the local inhabitants for their language and rough manners.

  The emperors themselves made the journey. Augustus stayed in Praeneste. Tiberius convalesced there after a dangerous illness and later made the city a municipium. Marcus Aurelius was at Praeneste with his family when his 7-year-old son Verus died. The ruins of a villa associated with Hadrian stand in the plain near the church of Santa Maria della Villa. That site lies about three-quarters of a mile from the town. A statue found there, the Braschi Antinous, is now in the Vatican Museums.

  Pliny the Younger maintained a villa at Praeneste, and L. Aurelius Avianius Symmachus retired there. Inscriptions found in the city record that its inhabitants were particularly fond of gladiatorial shows.

  Gaius Appuleius Diocles was born in 104 AD in Lamego, in the region of Lusitania that is now Portugal. He became one of the most celebrated athletes in ancient history and is widely regarded as the most richly compensated competitor the ancient world produced. After his retirement from chariot racing, he came to Praeneste and died there. Among the celebrated sporting figures of the Roman world, Diocles chose this hillside for his final home.

  2576

• 5. Fortune and Water

  ›

  Around 120 BC, Praeneste raised the sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia across at least nine levels of terraces. Ancient writers noted that it dwarfed every other building in Praeneste and even those in Rome itself. The project demanded massive excavations, enormous landfills, drainage works, and terrace walls built by a slave labour force over many years. Inscriptions recording the names of numerous magistrates involved in the work indicate how long the construction lasted.

  Praeneste was chiefly famous in the ancient world for the oracle attached to the Temple of Fortuna Primigenia. The oracle was called the sortes praenestinae, or the Praenestine lots, and drew visitors from across the Roman world. Archaeologists working in the 1950s identified the area around the Cathedral and the Piazza Regina Margherita as the original Forum of ancient Praeneste. The Forum's basilica was a two-storey structure with four naves separated by columns. Its facade included a sundial described by the Roman scholar Varro, traces of which can still be seen.

  Two nymphaea flanked the basilica, each containing spectacular mosaics. The eastern nymphaeum held the Nile mosaic of Palestrina, depicting scenes from the Egyptian river. It is now displayed on the third floor of the National Archaeological Museum of Palestrina, in the Palazzo Colonna Barberini. The western nymphaeum was a natural cave enlarged with three niches. Its roof was embellished with artificial stalactites. A fine white mosaic paved the space in front of its entrance. The main mosaic panel depicted a seascape with a temple of Poseidon, flanked by fish, crustaceans, and molluscs in vivid colour. Both mosaics are thought to have been made by artists from Alexandria at the end of the 2nd century BC. Both were designed to be viewed through a moving veil of water, which deepened the colours of the images.

  The entire city depended on an elaborate water supply. Four aqueducts drew water from the springs of the Monti Prenestini; the most important and oldest was the Cannuccete. An enormous brick reservoir in Santa Lucia could hold up to 10 million litres. Water was channelled through cisterns, conduits beneath the Via del Sole, and underground drains in the vaulted rooms of the Via degli Arcioni. Those arched rooms, carved into the base of a massive terrace wall, served as shops and stables until recently. They were restored in 2017. Suetonius records that a calendar set up in the Forum by the grammarian Marcus Verrius Flaccus was found in 1771. It had been reused as building material inside the ruins of the church of Saint Agapitus.

  5829

• 6. Razed and Rebuilt

  ›

  A bishop of Praeneste is first recorded in the year 313 AD. By the eleventh century, the Colonna family, among Rome's most powerful dynasties, held Palestrina as a fief.

  In 1297 the Colonna revolted against Pope Boniface VIII. The following year, papal forces took the city and Boniface ordered it razed to the ground and salted. It was the punishment Rome had once inflicted on foreign enemies. A pope now applied it within his own domains. In the Inferno, Dante depicts Guido da Montefeltro counselling Boniface VIII. Guido advises the pope to offer the Colonna an amnesty in exchange for their surrender of Palestrina, though the amnesty was never meant to be honored.

  The city was rebuilt. In 1437, Giovanni Vitelleschi, a condottiero in papal service, captured it and destroyed it again at the command of Pope Eugenius IV. Stefano Colonna rebuilt and fortified it in 1448. It was sacked in 1527 and occupied by the Duke of Alba in 1556.

  In 1630 the comune passed by purchase into the hands of the Barberini family. The transfer was likely one of the conditions of the marriage of Taddeo Barberini and Anna Colonna. The family was headed by Maffeo Barberini, who had become Pope Urban VIII; the Barberini treated Palestrina as a principality. The title of Prince of Palestrina was conferred on various family members. During Urban VIII's reign it became interchangeable with the title of Commander of the Papal Army.

  The newly elected Pope Innocent X launched an investigation into the Barberini family. Taddeo Barberini, who held both the Prince of Palestrina title and command of the Papal Army, fled into exile with other family members. The Barberini later reconciled. Innocent X elevated Taddeo's son Carlo Barberini to the cardinalate. Taddeo's other son Maffeo married a niece of the Pope and reclaimed the title of Prince of Palestrina. Two family members, Antonio Barberini and Francesco Barberini the Younger, son of Maffeo, served as Cardinal-Bishop of the Diocese of Palestrina. The Barberini Palace, raised above the ancient temple theatre of Fortuna, later became the National Archaeological Museum of Palestrina.

  1052

• 7. Names That Traveled

  ›

  Aelian, a Roman writer who flourished in the 3rd century AD, claimed Palestrina as his home town. Thirteen centuries later, a 16th-century composer was born on the same hillside and took the city's name as his own surname. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina went on to write sacred polyphony that would shape European music for generations. His name travels to this day wherever Renaissance music is performed.

  In 1895, Thomas Mann visited Palestrina. He returned in 1897 accompanied by his brother Heinrich Mann, for a long and harsh summer on the hill. More than four decades later, those stays resurfaced in Mann's novel Doktor Faustus. The summers in Palestrina provided the setting for protagonist Adrian Leverkühn's pact with the Devil.

  In Voltaire's novel Candide, a woman appears claiming to be the daughter of Pope Urban X and the Princess of Palestrina. Garibaldi fought an action against the Neapolitan army at Palestrina in 1849, during his defence of the Roman Republic. Geoffrey Trease later gave that battle fictional form in his novel Follow My Black Plume. Palestrina is twinned today with Füssen in Germany and, since 2007, with Bièvres in France. Doktor Faustus appeared nearly half a century after Mann first climbed this hill. The city waited that long to become fiction.

  510