Mura romane di Terni

The surviving stretch of Terni's Republican-era defences still lines Via delle Mura: squared travertine blocks laid in opus quadratum, commonly dated to the third century BC, and the clearest visible link to Interamna Nahars, the Roman town that grew up between the Nera and the Serra.

Why it matters

Terni was one of Umbria's principal Roman towns, although its ancient history is less visible than its waterfalls and industrial heritage. The walls are the city's oldest surviving monument. The municipal tourism portal compares their squared-stone technique with the great Umbrian wall circuits of Spoleto, Perugia and Assisi, which places Interamna Nahars in the first rank of early Roman foundations in the region. They also explain the shape of the historic centre: until the second half of the nineteenth century, Terni fitted entirely within the Nera, the Serra stream and a Romano-medieval wall circuit roughly three kilometres long on the southern side. Medieval churches and palazzi sit within a perimeter first fixed in the Republican era.

What to notice

A stretch of the ancient circuit survives along Via delle Mura, where the wall follows the profile of the Passeggiata around the old town. The Roman work is opus quadratum: travertine dressed into great square blocks and stacked in even, mortarless courses. Where the fabric changes to much smaller blocks, the masonry indicates medieval rebuilding, because the circuit was repaired and raised for centuries after antiquity. Further fragments survive near Porta Sant'Angelo and Porta Spoletina and between Via Giannelli and Via delle Mura.

Context and history

The Latin name Interamna Nahars means the town between the rivers, and the walls made that definition physical. According to the Enciclopedia Treccani, the city was a federate ally of Rome during the Samnite Wars, received full citizenship after the Social War, and became a municipality of the Crustumine tribe; the writer Florus called it the "splendidissimum Italiae municipium", the most splendid municipality of Italy. A traditional foundation date of 672 BC circulated in antiquity, recorded in an inscription of AD 32, but the standing defences are usually placed much later, in the third century BC, when Roman influence was consolidating across Umbria. The walled town had four gates, and the Roman street plan survives in miniature: the Via Flaminia crossed the centre as the cardo along today's Via Roma and Corso Vecchio, crossing the decumanus at Piazza della Repubblica, the site of the ancient forum. Monumental building continued into the Augustan age and the first century AD, when the amphitheatre went up. After the fall of Rome the circuit kept working. The medieval city was destroyed in 1174 by the imperial army of Christian of Mainz and rebuilt behind the same line, which is why the surviving wall is a layered document: Roman at the base, medieval above, and the boundary of Terni until the nineteenth-century expansions.