Palestrina

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For other uses, see Palestrina (disambiguation).

Comune di Palestrina
Municipal coat of arms
Country	Italy
Region	Latium
Province	Rome (RM)
Mayor

Elevation	450 m
Area	46.8 km²
Population
- Total (as of Dec. 2004)	18,012
- Density	385/km²
Time zone	CET, UTC+1
Coordinates	41°50′N 12°54′E
Gentilic	Palestrinesi o Prenestini
Dialing code	06
Postal code	00036 (capital, Valvarino), 00030 (Carchitti)
Frazioni	Carchitti, Valvarino
Patron	St. Agapitus martyr
- Day	August 18
Location of Palestrina in Italy
Website: www.comune.palestrina.rm.it/

Palestrina (ancient Praeneste) was and is a very ancient city of Latium (modern Lazio) c. 35 km east of Rome, and was reached by the Via Praenestina (see below). Palestrina is sited on a strategic spur of the Apennines.

1 Ancient Praeneste
2 Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia
3 Later history
4 Current commune
5 Main sights
6 Demographic evolution
7 References
8 See also
9 Sources and external links

[edit] Ancient Praeneste

Early burials show that the site was already occupied in the 8th or 7th century BC. The ancient necropolis lay on a plateau at the foot of the hill below the ancient town. Of the objects found in the oldest graves, and supposed to date from about the 7th century BC, the cups of silver and silver-gilt and most of the gold and amber jewelry are Phoenician (possibly Carthaginian), but the bronzes and some of the ivory articles seem to be of the Etruscan civilization.

No objects have been discovered belonging to the period intermediate between the 7th and 3rd centuries BC. But from about 250 BC onwards we have a series of Praenestine graves surmounted by the characteristic pine-apple of local stone, containing stone coffins with rich bronze, ivory and gold ornaments beside the skeleton. From these come the famous bronze boxes (cistae) and hand mirrors with inscriptions partly in Etruscan. The famous bronze Ficoroni casket (Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome), engraved with pictures of the arrival of the Argonauts in Bithynia and the victory of Pollux over Amycus, found in 1738, is still unrivalled. An example of archaic Latin is the inscription on Cista Ficoroni: "Novios Plautios Romai med fecid / Dindia Macolnia fileai dedit" ("Novios Plautios made me in Rome, Dindia Macolnia gave me to her daughter"). The caskets are unique in Italy, but a large number of mirrors of precisely similar style have been discovered in Etruria. Hence, although it would be reasonable to conjecture that objects with Etruscan characteristics came from Etruria, the evidence points decisively to an Etruscan factory in or near Praeneste itself.

Other imported objects in the burials show that Praeneste traded not only with Etruria but also with the Greek east. The origin of Præneste was attributed by the ancients to Ulysses, or to another fabulous personage. Praeneste was probably under the hegemony of Alba Longa while that city was the head of the Latin League. It withdrew from the league in 499 BC, according to Livy (its earlest historical mention), and formed an alliance with Rome. After Rome was weakened by the Gauls of Brennus (390 BC), Praeneste switched allegiances and fought against Rome in the long struggles that culminated in the Latin War. From 373 to 370, it was in continual war against Rome or her allies, and was defeated by Cincinnatus.

Eventually in 354 and in 338 the Romans were victorious and Praeneste was punished by the loss of portions of its territory, becoming a city allied to Rome. As such, it furnished contingents to the Roman army, and Roman exiles were permitted to live at Praeneste, which grew prosperous. The roses of Praeneste were a byword for profusion and beauty. Præneste was situated on the Via Labicana. Its citizens were offered Roman citizenship in 90 BC in the Social War, when concessions had to be made by Rome to cement necessary alliances. In the Civil Wars of Sulla, Gaius Marius the Younger was blockaded in the town by the forces of Sulla (82 BC). When the city was captured, Marius slew himself, the male inhabitants were massacred in cold blood, and a military colony was settled on part of its territory. From an inscription it appears that Sulla delegated the foundation of the new colony to Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus, who was consul in 73 BC. Within a decade the lands of the colonia had been assembled by a few large landowners.

It was probably after the disaster of 82 BC that the city was removed from the hillside to the lower ground at the Madonna dell Aquila, and that the sanctuary and temple of Fortune was enlarged so as to include much of the space occupied by the ancient city.

Under the Empire the cool breezes of Praeneste made it a favorite summer resort of wealthy Romans, whose villas studded the neighborhood, though they ridiculed the language and the rough manners of the native inhabitants. The poet Horace ranked "cool Praeneste" with Tibur and Baiae as favored resorts. The emperor Augustus stayed in Praeneste, and Tiberius recovered there from a dangerous illness and made it a municipium. The ruins of the villa associated with Hadrian stand in the plain near the church of S. Maria della Villa, about three-quarters of a mile from the town. At the site was discovered the Braschi Antinous, now in the Vatican Museums. Marcus Aurelius, Pliny the Younger and Symmachus also had villas there. Inscriptions show that the inhabitants of Praeneste were fond of gladiatorial shows.

[edit] Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia

Praeneste was chiefly famed for its great Temple of Fortuna Primigenia connected with the oracle known as the Praenestine lots (sortes praenestinae). The temple was redeveloped after 82 BC as a spectacular series of terraces, exedras and porticos on four levels down the hillside, linked by monumental stairs and ramps. The inspiration for this feat of unified urbanistic design lay, not in republican Rome, but in the Hellenistic monarchies of the eastern Mediterranean. Praeneste offered a foretaste of the grandiose Imperial style of the following generation.^[1]

The oldest portion of the primitive sanctuary was situated on the terrace just above the lowest one, in a grotto in the natural rock where there was a spring that developed into a well. As the archaic shrine was elaborated from the 2nd century BC, it was given a colored mosaic pavement representing a seascape: a temple of Poseidon on the shore, with fish of all kinds swimming in the sea. To the east of this grotto is a large space, now open, but once very possibly roofed, and forming a two-story basilica built against the rock on the north side, and there decorated with pilasters. To the east is an apsidal hall, often identified with the temple itself, in which was found the famous mosaic with scenes from the Nile, relaid in the Palazzo Barberini-Colonna on the uppermost terrace (now the National Museum). Under this hall is a chamber, which an inscription on its walls identified as a treasury in the 2nd century BC. In front of this temple an obelisk was erected in the reign of Claudius, fragments of which still exist.

As extended under Sulla, the sanctuary of Fortune came to occupy a series of five vast terraces, which, resting on gigantic masonry substructure and connected with each other by grand staircases, rose one above the other on the hill in the form of the side of a pyramid, crowned on the highest terrace by the round temple of Fortune.^[1] This immense edifice, probably by far the largest sanctuary in Italy, must have presented a most imposing aspect, visible as it was from a great part of Latium, from Rome, and even from the sea. The ground at the foot of the lowest terrace is 1476 feet (450 m) above sea-level; here is a cistern, divided into ten large chambers, in brick-faced concrete.

The goddess Fortuna here went by the name of Primigenia ("First Bearer"), she was represented suckling two babes, as in the Christian representation of Charity, said to be Jupiter and Juno, and she was especially worshipped by matrons. The oracle continued to be consulted down to Christian times, until Constantine the Great, and again later Theodosius I, forbade the practice and closed the temple.

Features of the temple influenced Roman garden design on steeply sloped sites through Antiquity and once again in Italian villa gardens from the 15th century. The monument to Vittorio Emmanuel II in Rome owes a lot to the Praeneste sanctuary complex.

[edit] Later history

The modern town is built on the ruins of the famous temple of Fortuna Primigenia. A bishop of Praeneste is first mentioned in 313.

In 1297 the Colonna family, who then owned Praeneste (by then called Palestrina) from the eleventh century as a fief, revolted from the pope. In the following year the town was taken by Papal forces and razed to the ground by order of Pope Boniface VIII. In 1437 the rebuilt city was captured by the papal general Giovanni, Cardinal Vitelleschi and once more utterly destroyed at the command of Pope Eugenius IV.

It was rebuilt once more and fortified by Stefano Colonna in 1448. It was again sacked in 1527, and occupied by the Duke of Alba, in 1556. In 1630 it passed by purchase into the Barberini family. Praeneste was the native town of the 3rd century Roman writer Aelian, and of the great 16th century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.

[edit] Current commune

Nowadyas, Palestrina is a comune (municipality) with a population of about 18,000 and an area of 46.8 km².^[2] The municipality of Palestrina contains the frazioni (subdivisions, mainly villages and hamlets) Carchitti and Valvarino.

Palestrina borders the following municipalities: Artena, Castel San Pietro Romano, Cave, Gallicano nel Lazio, Labico, Rocca di Cave, Rocca Priora, Rome, San Cesareo, Valmontone, Zagarolo.

An old street in the city.

[edit] Main sights

The modern town of Palestrina is centered on the terraces once occupied by the massive temple of Fortune. The town came to largely obscure the temple, whose monumental remains were revealed as a result of American bombing of German positions in World War II.

The town contains remnants of cyclopean walls and of the aforesaid great temple of Fortune.

On the summit of the hill (753 m), nearly a mile from the town, stood the ancient citadel, the site of which is now occupied by a few poor houses (Castel San Pietro) and a ruined medieval castle of the Colonna family. The magnificent view embraces Soracte, Rome, the Alban Hills and the Campania as far as the sea. Considerable portions of the southern wall of the ancient citadel, built in very massive Cyclopean masonry of blocks of limestone, are still to be seen; and the two walls, also polygonal, which formerly united the citadel with the town, can still be traced.

The calendar, which, as Suetonius tells, was set up by the grammarian, Marcus Verrius Flaccus in the forum of Praeneste (the reference being to the forum of the imperial period, at the Madonna dell'Aquila), was discovered in the ruins of the church of S. Agapitus in 1771, where it had been used as building material.

The cathedral, just below the level of the temple, occupies the former civil basilica of the town, upon the facade of which was a sundial described by Varro, traces of which may still be seen. In the modern piazza the steps leading up to this latter basilica and the base of a large monument were found in 1907; so that only a part of the piazza represents the ancient forum. The cathedral has fine paintings and frescoes. In the Church of St. Rosalia (1677) there is an admirable Pietà, carved in the solid rock.

[edit] Demographic evolution

[edit] References

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

^ ^a ^b Roth, Leland M. (1993). Understanding Architecture: Its Elements, History and Meaning, First, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 217-8. ISBN 0-06-430158-3.
^ All demographics and other statistics: Italian statistical institute Istat.