The City, Its Walls and Gates
The general supposition has been that the earliest inhabitants of Præneste lived only in the citadel on top of the hill. This theory is supported by the fact that there is room enough, and, as will be shown below, there was in early times plenty of water there; nevertheless it is certain that this was not the whole of the site of the early city.
The earliest inhabitants of Præneste needed first of all, safety, then a place for pasturage, and withal, to be as close to the fertile land at the foot of the mountain as possible. The first thing the inhabitants of the new city did was to build a wall. There is still a little of this oldest wall in the circuit about the citadel, and it was built at exactly the same time as the lower part of the double walls that extend down the southern slope of the mountain on each side of the upper part of the modern town. It happens that by following the edges of the slope of this southern face of the mountain down to a certain point, one realizes that even without a wall the place would be practically impregnable. Add to this the fact that all the stones necessary for a wall were obtained during the scarping of the arx on the side toward the Sabines,31 and needed only to be rolled down, not up, to their places in the wall, which made the task a very easy one comparatively. Now if a place can be found which is naturally a suitable place for a lower cross wall, we shall have what an ancient site demanded; first, safety, because the site now proposed is just as impregnable as the citadel itself, and still very high above the plain below; second, pasturage, for on the slope between the lower town and the arx is the necessary space which the arx itself hardly supplies; and third, a more reasonable nearness to the fertile land below. All the conditions necessary are fulfilled by a cross wall in Præneste, which up to this time has remained mostly unknown, often neglected or wrongly described, and wholly misunderstood. As we shall see, however, this very wall was the lower boundary of the earliest Præneste. The establishment of this important fact will remove one of the many stumbling blocks over which earlier writers on Præneste have fallen.
It has been said above that the lowest part of the wall of the arx, and the two walls from it down the mountain were built at the same time. The accompanying plate (III) shows very plainly the course of the western wall as it comes down the hill lining the edge of the slope where it breaks off most sharply. Porta San Francesco, the modern gate, is above the second tree from the right in the illustration, just where the wall seems to turn suddenly. There is no trace of ancient wall after the gate is passed. The white wall, as one proceeds from the gate to the right, is the modern wall of the Franciscan monastery. All the writers on Præneste say that the ancient wall came on around the town where the lower wall of the monastery now is, and followed the western limit of the present town as far as the Porta San Martino.
Returning now to plate II we observe a thin white line of wall which joins a black line running off at an angle to our left. This is also a piece of the earliest cyclopean wall, and it is built just at the eastern edge of the hill where it falls off very sharply.
Now if one follows the Via di San Francesco in from the gate of that name (see plate III again) and then continues down a narrow street east of the monastery as far as the open space in front of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, he will see that on his left above him the slope of the mountain was not only precipitous by nature but that also it has been rendered entirely unassailable by scarping.32 From the lower end of this steep escarpment there is a cyclopean wall, of the same date as the upper side walls of the town, and the wall of the arx, which runs entirely across the city to within a few yards of the wall on the east, and to a point just below a portella, where the upper cyclopean wall makes a slight change in direction. The presence of the gate and the change of direction in the wall mean a corner in the wall.
It is strange indeed that this wall has not been recognized for what it really is. A bit of it shows above the steps where the Via dello Spregato leaves the Via del Borgo. Fernique shows this much in his map, but by a curious oversight names it opus incertum.33 More than two irregular courses are to be seen here, and fifteen feet in from the street, forming the back wall of cellars and pig pens, the cyclopean wall, in places to a height of fifteen feet or more, can be followed to within a few yards of the open space in front of Santa Maria del Carmine. And on the other side toward the east the same wall begins again, after being broken by the Via dello Spregato, and forms the foundations and side walls of the houses on the south side of that street, and at the extreme east end is easily found as the back wall of a blacksmith’s shop at the top of the Via della Fontana, and can be identified as cyclopean by a little cleaning of the wall.
The circuit of the earliest cyclopean wall and natural ramparts of the contemporaneous citadel and town of Præneste was as follows: An arc of cyclopean wall below the cap of the hill which swung round from the precipitous cliff on the west to that on the east, the whole of the side of the arx toward the mountains being so steep that no wall was necessary; then a second loop of cyclopean wall from the arx down the steep western edge of the southern slope of the mountain as far as the present Porta San Francesco. From this point natural cliffs reinforced at the upper end by a short connecting wall bring us to the beginning of the wall which runs across the town back of the Via del Borgo from Santa Maria del Carmine to within a short distance of the east wall of the city, separated from it in fact only by the Via della Fontana, which runs up just inside the wall. There it joins the cyclopean wall which comes down from the citadel on the east side of the town.
The reasons why this is the oldest circuit of the city’s walls are the following: first, all this stretch of wall is the oldest and was built at the same time; second, topography has marked out most clearly that the territory inclosed by these walls, here and only here, fulfills the two indispensable requisites of the ancient town, namely space and defensibility; third, below the gate San Francesco all the way round the city as far as Porta del Sole, neither in the wall nor in the buildings, nor in the valley below, is there any trace of cyclopean wall stones;34 fourth, at the point where the cross wall and the long wall must have met at the east, the wall makes a change in direction, and there is an ancient postern gate just above the jog in the wall; and last, the cyclopean wall from this junction on down to near the Porta del Sole is later than that of the circuit just described.35
The city was extended within a century perhaps, and the new line of the city wall was continued on the east in cyclopean style as far as the present Porta del Sole, where it turned to the west and continued until the hill itself offered enough height so that escarpment of the natural cliff would serve in place of the wall. Then it turned up the hill between the present Via San Biagio and Via del Carmine back of Santa Maria del Carmine. The proof for this expansion is clear. The continuation of the cyclopean wall can be seen now as far as the Porta del Sole,36 and the line of the wall which turns to the west is positively known from the cippi of the ancient pomerium, which were found in 1824 along the present Via degli Arconi.37 The ancient gate, now closed, in the opus quadratum wall under the Cardinal’s garden, is in direct line with the ancient pavement of the road which comes up to the city from the south,38 and the continuation of that road, which seems to have been everywhere too steep for wagons, is the Via del Carmine. There had always been another road outside the wall which went up a less steep grade, and came round the angle of the wall at what is now the Porta S. Martino, where it entered a gate that opened out of the present Corso toward the west. When at a later time, probably in the middle ages, the city was built out to its present boundary on the west, the wagon road was simply arched over, and this arch is now the gate San Martino.39
It will be necessary to speak further of the cyclopean wall on the east side of the city from the Porta del Sole to the Portella, for it has always been supposed that this part of the wall was exactly like the rest, and dated from the same period. But a careful examination shows that the stones in this lower portion are laid more regularly than those in the wall above the Portella, that they are more flatly faced on the outside, and that here and there a little mortar is used. Above all, however, there is in the wall on one of the stones under the house no. 24, Via della Fontana an inscription,40 which Richter, Dressel, and Dessau all think was there when the stone was put in the wall, and incline to allow no very remote date for the building of the wall at that point. To me, after a comparative study of this wall and the one at Norba, the two seem to date from very nearly the same time, and no one now dares attribute great antiquity to the walls of Norba. But the rest of the cyclopean wall of Præneste is very ancient, certainly a century, perhaps two or three centuries, older than the part from the Portella down.
There remains still to be discussed the lower wall of the city on the south, and a restraining terrace wall along part of the present Corso Pierluigi. The stretch of city wall from the Porta del Sole clear across the south front to the Porta di S. Martino is of opus quadratum, with the exception of a stretch of opus incertum41 below and east of the Barberini gardens, and a small space where the city sewage has destroyed all vestige of a wall. The restraining wall just mentioned is also of opus quadratum and is to be found along the south side of the Corso, but can be seen only from the winecellars on the terrace below that street. These walls of opus quadratum were built with a purpose, to be sure, but their entire meaning has not been understood.42
The upper wall, the one along the Corso, can not be traced farther than the Piazza Garibaldi, in front of the Cathedral. It has been a mistake to consider this a high wall. It was built simply to level up with the Corso terrace, partly to give more space on the terrace, partly to make room for a road which ran across the city here between two gates no longer in existence. But more especially was it built to be the lower support for a gigantic water reservoir which extends under nearly the whole width of this terrace from about Corso Pierluigi No. 88 almost to the Cathedral.43 The four sides of this great reservoir are also of opus quadratum laid header and stretcher.
The lower wall, the real town wall, is a wall only in appearance, for it has but one thickness of blocks, set header and stretcher in a mass of solid concrete.44 This wall makes very clear the impregnability of even the lower part of Præneste, for the wall not only occupies a good position, but is really a double line of defense. There are here two walls, one above the other, the upper one nineteen feet back of the lower, thus leaving a terrace of that width.45 At the east, instead of the lower solid wall of opus quadratum, there is a series of fine tufa arches built to serve as a substructure for something. It is to be remembered again that between the arches on the east and the solid wall on the west is a stretch of 200 feet of opus incertum, and a space where there is no wall at all. This lower wall of Præneste occupies the same line as the ancient wall and escarpment, but the most of what survives was restored in Sulla’s time. The opus quadratum is exactly the same style as that in the Tabularium in Rome.
Now, no one could see the width of the terrace above the lower wall, without thinking that so great a width was unnecessary unless it was to give room for a road.46 The difficulty has been, however, that the line of arches at the east, not being in alignment with the lower wall on the west, has not been connected with it hitherto, and so a correct understanding of their relation has been impossible.
Before adducing evidence to show the location of the main and triumphal entrance to Præneste, we shall turn to the town above for a moment to see whether it is, a priori, reasonable to suppose that there was an entrance to the city here in the center of its front wall. If roads came up a grade from the east and west, they would join at a point where now there is no wall at all. This break is in the center of the south wall, just above the forum which was laid out in Sulla’s time on the level spot immediately below the town. Most worthy of note, however, is that this opening is straight below the main buildings of the ancient town, the basilica, which is now the cathedral, and the temple of Fortuna. But further, a fact which has never been noticed nor accounted for, this opening is also in front of the modern square, the piazza Garibaldi, which is in front of the buildings just mentioned but below them on the next terrace, yet there is no entrance to this terrace shown.47 It is well known that the open space south of the temple, beside the basilica, has an ancient pavement some ten feet below the present level of the modern piazza Savoia.48 Proof given below in connection with the large tufa base which is on the level of the lower terrace will show that the piazza Garibaldi was an open space in ancient times and a part of the ancient forum. Again, the solarium, which is on the south face of the basilica,49 was put up there that it might be seen, and as it faces the south, the piazza Garibaldi, and this open space in the wall under discussion, what is more likely than that there was not only an open square below the basilica, but also the main approach to the city?
But now for the proof. In 1756 ancient paving stones were still in situ50 above the row of arches on the Via degli Arconi, and even yet the ascent is plain enough to the eye. The ground slopes up rather moderately along the Via degli Arconi toward the east, and nearly below the southeast corner of the ancient wall turned up to the west on these arches, approaching the entrance in the middle of the south wall of the city.51 But these arches and the road on them do not align exactly with the terrace on the west. Nor should they do so. The arches are older than the present opus quadratum wall, and the road swung round and up to align with the road below and the old wall or escarpment of the city above. Then when the whole town, its gates, its walls, and its temple, were enlarged and repaired by Sulla, the upper wall was perfectly aligned, a lower wall built on the west leaving a terrace for a road, and the arches were left to uphold the road on the east. Although the arches were not exactly in line, the road could well have been so, for the terrace here was wider and ran back to the upper wall.52 The evidence is also positive enough that there was an ascent to the terrace on the west, the one below the Barberini gardens, which corresponds to the ascent on the arches. This terrace now is level, and at its west end is some twenty feet above the garden below. But the wall shows very plainly that it had sloped off toward the west, and the slope is most clearly to be seen, where a very obtuse angle of newer and different tufa has been laid to build up the wall to a level.53 It is to be noticed too that this terrace is the same height as the top of the ascent above the arches. We have then actual proofs for roads leading up from east and west toward the center of the wall on the south side of the city, and every reason that an entrance here was practicable, credible, and necessary.
But there is one thing more necessary to make probabilities tally wholly with the facts. If there was a grand entrance to the city, below the basilica, the temple, and the main open square, which faced out over the great forum below, there must have been a monumental gate in the wall. As a matter of fact there was such a gate, and I believe it was called the PORTA TRIUMPHALIS. An inscription of the age of the Antonines mentions “seminaria a Porta Triumphale,” and this passing reference to a gate with a name which in itself implies a gate of consequence, so well known that a building placed near it at once had its location fixed, gives the rest of the proof necessary to establish a central entrance to the city in front, through a PORTA TRIUMPHALIS.54
Before the time of Sulla there had been a gate in the south wall of the city, approached by one road, which ascended from the east on the arches facing the present Via degli Arconi. After entering the city one went straight up a grade not very steep to the basilica, and to the open square or ancient forum which was the space now occupied by the two modern piazzas, the Garibaldi and the Savoia, and on still farther to the temple. When Sulla rebuilt the city, and laid out a forum on the level space directly south of and below the town, he made another road from the west to correspond to the old ascent from the east, and brought them together at the old central gate, which he enlarged to the PORTA TRIUMPHALIS. In the open square in front of the basilica had stood the statue of some famous man55 on a platform of squared stone 16 x 17-1/2 feet in measurement. Around this base the Sullan improvements put a restraining wall of opus quadratum.56 The open square was in front of the basilica and to its left below the temple. There was but one way to the terrace above the temple from the ancient forum. This was a steep road to the right, up the present Via delle Scalette. Another road ran to the left back of the basilica, but ended either in front of the western cave connected with the temple, or at the entrance into the precinct of the temple.