Roman Umbria

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The Roman region of Umbria, Regio VI Umbria, was one of the fourteen regions into which Augustus divided Italy; it is named after a proto-Italic people, the Umbri, who were gradually subjected by the Romans in the 4th through the 2d centuries BC. Although it passed the name on to the modern region of Umbria, the two coincide only partially. Roman Umbria extended from Narni in the South, northeastward to the neighborhood of Ravenna on the Adriatic coast, thus including a large part of central Italy that now belongs to the Marche; at the same time, it excluded the Sabine country (generally speaking, the area around modern Norcia) and the right bank of the Tiber, which formed part of Roman Etruria: for example Perusia (the modern Perugia) was not part of Roman Umbria; and Sarsina, the birthplace of Plautus, is regularly stated to have been "in Umbria" — which it was, but is not now: Sarsina is in the modern province of Forlì, in Emilia-Romagna.

The importance of Umbria in Roman and medieval times was intimately bound up with the Via Flaminia, the consular road that supplied Rome and served as a military highway into and out of the City: for this reason once the Roman empire collapsed, Umbria became a strategic battleground fought over by the Church, the Lombards and the Byzantines, and suffered consequently, becoming partitioned among them and disappearing from history. The modern use of "Umbria" is due to a renascence of local identity in the 17th century.