Mura romane di Augusta Praetoria e torri medievali

Aosta is one of the few cities in Italy where you can still walk almost the whole ring of a Roman colony's walls. The circuit of Augusta Praetoria's defences, threaded with medieval towers raised on Roman foundations, doubles as a tour of the town — every gate and tower tells part of two thousand years of urban life.

Why it matters

When Augustus founded the colony in 25 BC, its walls announced Roman permanence at the doorstep of Gaul. The rectangle they drew — roughly 727 metres on the long sides and 574 on the short ones — still governs Aosta's street plan, and long sections of the original facing survive built into later houses. Unusually, the defences were never demolished; they were recycled. Medieval families turned the Roman towers into private strongholds, and the result is a single structure you can read in two eras: Roman military engineering below, medieval patrician power above. The walls and towers reflect two millennia of urban development.

What to notice

The wall's construction consists of a concrete core with river pebbles and small facing blocks, originally about six and a half metres high and nearly two metres thick at the base. Among the towers, Tour Fromage, on the eastern side near the Roman theatre, was rebuilt in the twelfth century and takes its name from the Fromage family, one of Aosta's medieval dynasties; the region now owns it and has used it for exhibitions. The Torre del Lebbroso preserves Roman masonry at its base and carries its name from Pietro Bernardo Guasco, a leper confined there in the late eighteenth century — the story behind Xavier de Maistre's novel. The Bramafam tower marks a gate position and a medieval castle of the viscounts of Aosta.

Context and history

The walls enclosed about forty-one hectares, defended by some twenty towers at regular intervals and pierced by four gates aligned on the cardo and decumanus: Porta Praetoria to the east, the Porta Decumana to the west, and the two lateral gates north and south. Solid enough to outlive the empire, they were the skeleton into which medieval Aosta grew — families such as the Fromage, the Friour and the viscounts who became the Challant fortified the Roman towers, while religious houses absorbed other stretches. Later restorers, including Alfredo d'Andrade in the nineteenth century, consolidated what remains. Much of the enclosure survives nearly intact, partly hidden inside later buildings.