PLACENTIA
(Piacenza) Italy.
In flat open
country 60 km SE of Milan on the S side of the Po near
its confluence with the Trebia. The conjecture that until
190 B.C. the town lay some 24 km farther W should be
discounted. Situated on territory that once belonged to
the Celtic Anamares and, before them, to the terramara
folk, Placentia came into being in 218 B.C. when Rome
established a large Latin colony of 6000 settlers on the
site just at the onset of the second Punic war. The town
is repeatedly mentioned in the third decade of Livy as
the target of furious Gallic, Carthaginian, and Ligurian
assaults: in 200 B.C. Gallic tribes actually succeeded in
plundering it. But a new infusion of colonists in 190 B.C.
and the construction in 187 B.C. of the great Ariminum-Placentia highway, the Via Aemilia, assured its future.
Placentia became and has ever since remained one of
the chief Cispadane cities even though it has repeatedly
been the scene of fierce warfare for control of its strategically important river port and highway network. Acquiring full Roman citizenship in 90 B.C., it became a municipium and later a colonia.
Today no Roman monuments are visible at Piacenza,
but the orthogonal plan of the city center retains the
town plan of the original military settlement: it was a
square castrum with sides ca. 480 m long. The limits of
the castrum were roughly: N, Via Benedettine; S, Via
Sopramuro; E, Via Dogana; and W, Via Mandelli. By
Imperial times the city had far outgrown its original
limits. The Via Aemilia, today's Via Roma, served as
decumanus maximus; and today's Via Taverna follows
the route of the ancient Via Postumia. The Duomo adjoins the site of the baths and the Biblioteca Comunale that of the forum.
Antiquities are mostly housed in the Museo Civico.
The most notable is the famous bronze sheep's liver of
ca. 200 B.C., which Etruscan augurs evidently used for
divination purposes. Found at Piacenza in 1877, it has
16 principal divisions, each inscribed with the Etruscan
names of a major and other divinities. Other interesting
antiquities are a fragmentary statue of a woman of the
1st c. B.C. signed by the Athenian sculptor Kleomenes,
and a circular mosaic of the 1st c. A.D., depicting swan-like birds in good perspective.
Aerial photography of the surrounding countryside
clearly reveals the Roman centuriation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
T. Frank, “Placentia and the Battle of
the Trebia” in
JRS 9 (1919) 202-7; M. Corradi-Cervi
& E. Nasalli-Rocca, “Placentia” in
Arch. Stor. per le
Prov. Parmensi, Ser. III, 3 (1938) 45-95; M. Pallottino,
Etruscologia (6th ed., 1968) 245, 249-54, pl. XXX; D. E.
Strong,
The Early Etruscans (1968) 93f; J. B. Ward-Perkins,
Cities of Ancient Greece & Italy: Planning in Classical Antiquity (1974) 28f, 122f, fig. 54.
E. T. SALMON
