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Cinque Terre - Riviera - the Romans
"This region according to the division made by Augustus, is the
ninth. The ligurian coast between the river Varus and the Magra extdends
two hundred and eleven miles."
(PLINY, Naturalis historia, III, 5, 46 )
With the principality of Augustus which we now call Liguria was a region
that went beyond the present-day administrative limits, and comprising a
vast and articulated territory where the river Varus and the Alps marked
the western border, the river Po the northern one and the river Magra
the eastern one. Immediately after the disappearance of the threat of
Hannibal (202 BC), the situation of the immense Northern Italian
countryside was still precarious and politically unstable.
The
anti-Roman coalition between the Gauls and the Ligurians, which was
still strong and perilous, was neutralized through a series of rapid and
incisive military operations and with consequent territorial
reorganization, new blood being brought to the existing colonial
garrisons, as well as with new movements of colonies and the opening up
of new penetration pathways.
The problem of Gaul having been solved,
rapid anti-Ligurian raids at short intervals went on for about
twenty-five years, in 200-173 BC, with chequered vicissitudes and often
disastrous results for the Roman contingents. The Romans, having
realized that no agreement could be reached through treaties and
diplomatic ties, had to resort to more drastic and definitive
instruments, which culminated in the well-known deportation of the
Ligures Apuani to Sannio, near Beneventum, in 180-179 BC.
It was the
consul Claudius Marcellus who in 155 BC celebrated the triumph that
sanctioned the end of the conflict between Romans and Ligurians and
paved the way for the Romanization of their territory". " The Romans, as
they subjugated the regions of Italy with arms, became masters of part
of the territory and founded their towns there." (Appian, Bella Civilia,
1.29 ).
These
towns were the colonies that, together with the layout of roads and the
centuriation of the territory, were the first step in Roman penetration,
first of all strategic and military, and then economic and cultural. By
the end of the second century AD, the process of Romanization of the
eastern Ligurian area can be said to have been completed: all the
necessary conditions had been fulfilled for its definitive
reorganization.
On the ager which had been confiscated from the Ligures
Apuani, and from which the latter had been deported, in 177 BC the Luna
colony had been set up. Now, having lost its initial political and
military function, it became the starting point for the revival of the
economy: through its harbor facilities and its roads, and through the
exploitation of the marble deposits in the Apuane Alps.
Archaeological
documentation emphasizes a widespread territorial layout which one can
put together not only from the evidence in the terrain, but also from a
series of old markings, though these can no longer be controlled.
Alongside the Luna pole, which Augustus' administrative subdivision
assigned with its quarries to the 7th Region Etruria - an area active in
the exportation of marble throughout the imperial age and beyond - there
was a territory known both through architectural vestiges which has been
lost but was documented (La Spezia gulf area: in the Muggiano, Fezzano,
Limone Melara, Pegazzano and Marola localities), and through sites which
are at present visible (Varignano, Bocca di Magra) or are known but
still buried (Fiumaretta).
We cannot fail to notice that, unlike other
regions in the Northern Italian environmental context, the Ligurian one
provides little data on the territorial layout of its extreme eastern
stretch, showing, for the Roman age too, a particular configuration,
with sparse population, Ligurian traditions, and perhaps precarious
forms of settlement involving modest and basic building techniques: one
should think, for example, of the villages which surely must have come
into being for the exploitation of woodland resources, probably
analogous to those which arose near the quarries. What is certain is
that along the coast there must have been residential and/or production
structures, as the poets tell us and as we see from the Varignano and
Bocca di Magra complexes. At any rate, the data afforded by necropolis
complexes highlight a process of absorption and integration of the
surviving autochthonous communities in the new social texture, which
with the pax augustea can be seen as having been established once and
for all.
 Material evidence At the Civic Museum in La Spezia, named after Ubaldo
Formentini, who was a passionate scholar and connoisseur of the La
Spezia and Luna territory, there are also preserved some nuclei of Roman
material, taken there from various sites in the province for various
reasons and after a variety of vicissitudes, which from its very birth
connoted the city's museum as a territorial reference pole. The finds
made during the second half of the nineteenth century and at the start
of the twentieth during the years of that intense planning, above all
military, which was to change so radically the appearance of the Gulf of
La Spezia - have mostly been lost.
However, notices and reports relating
to those finds, together with what has been preserved and more recent
acquisitions, make a satisfactory reading of the ancient territory
possible. Of particular importance, in this connection, are the few
indications coming from Marola and Muggiano, bearing witness to a series
of scattered coastal settlements and maritime villas, like the ones
which have come down to us at Varignano and Bocca di Magra, whose
structures were destroyed at the time of the major military
reorganization of the coast.
After World War II and in particular in the 1950s, there were other
discoveries due to expansion of the city of La Spezia on the plain and
hills, and contributions from the provincial territory The finding at
Pegazzano and Madrignano of the equipment from two burials in stone
boxes, unfortunately recovered without exploration of the archaeological
context and hence isolated, is an important testimony to a Ligurian
culture which by that time was politically dependent on the Romans but
still kept its own individuality in the burial rite. By contrast, we see
full-scale Romanization in the equipment in the Limone Melara
necropolis, located in the densely built-up foothill part of the city's
suburbs, and also in part of that brought to light in the diggings in
the 50s and 60s connected with the Bocca di Magra Roman villa, whose
remaining material (1970's diggings) is kept, instead, in the storerooms
attached to the archaeological zone of the Luna Roman city, to which
there is connected the big quantity of material recovered at the end of
the nineteenth century by the marble industrialist Carlo Fabbricotti,
who placed it in a private museum of his own, at the Colombarotto villa
in Carrara.
Courtesy of
APT Cinque Terre
36 Hours in the Cinque Terre, Italy, an article by the New York
Times
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