FERENTINUM
(Ferentino) Latium, Italy.
A
Hernican hill town on the Via Latina (modern Casilina)
about 75 km SE of Rome. It was taken by the Romans
in 361 B.C., remained faithful to Rome in the Hernican
revolt, and defied Hannibal in the second Punic war, for
which he laid it waste (
Livy 7.9.1; 9.42.11; 26.9.11). It
is famous for its fortifications and its monumental
acropolis.
The walls are of local limestone, large polygonal blocks
approaching rectangles with much coursing, the two surviving gates, Porta Stupa and Porta Sanguinaria, capped
with arches of regularly cut voussoirs. The walls, much
rebuilt in mediaeval times, can be followed around a
winding circuit that avoids acute angles and sites the
gates with some sophistication, but is towerless.
The acropolis had its own fortifications, which come
tangent to the city walls at the N corner and probably
joined them there, but the NE side cannot be traced. The
most important front is the SW, overlooking the town,
where a bold rectangular outwork juts forward at the S
corner. At its base this is of roughly trapezoidal blocks
of limestone in rough coursing set in a deep footing
trench cut into the stone of the hill. There is some effect
of bossing and a marked batter, and this work is carried
as coigning part way up the superstructure, which is of
travertine cut in long thin blocks laid in regular courses
of unequal height. The superstructure houses a system of
concrete vaults, an interior substructure of well-developed
plan and ingenious fenestration that carried at the level
of the top of the acropolis a rectangular building raised
a meter above a surrounding terrace, perhaps a temple.
It is known only that it faced NE, away from the town,
and had walls of, or faced with, travertine, files of Ionic
or Corinthian columns on a raised pliath down either
side of a central nave, and curious small windows evenly
spaced just above the plinth. The approach and pronaos,
if there was one, are completely lost. Some have thought
the whole might have been roofed with a vault. A
number of advanced building techniques were employed: concrete vaulting, relieving arches over lintels, a segmental
arch where there was not room for a full semicircle. The
whole structure is adorned with four building inscriptions
of the censors A. Hirtius and M. Lollius (
CIL X, 5837-40). The date is much debated, but the architectural
sophistication inclines the majority to the early 1st c. B.C.
The whole complex is of a build with the rest of the
acropolis fortifications, though variations in masonry appear in other stretches.
Just NE of the supposed boundary of the acropolis is
a well-preserved market building of Republican date, a
vaulted hall along one side of which open five vaulted
shops, an important predecessor of the basilica of the
Mercati di Traiano in Rome. There are poor remains of
a theater, and at nearby Terme Pompeo are cold sulphur
baths that were used in antiquity.
Ferentinum has yielded a great many inscriptions,
some of which are housed in the Raccolta d'Arte Coinunale, but the most famous is the will of Aulus Quintilius of the time of Trajan, carved in the rock outside
Porta Maggiore, in which he left income from lands to
the community (CIL x, 5853).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
T. Ashby in
RömMitt 24 (1909) 28-48;
A. Bartoli in
BdA 34 (1949) 293-306
MPI; G. Gullini in
ArchCl 6 (1954) 185-216 & pls. 44-63; L. Benevolo &
F. Fasolo in
Istituto di Storia dell'Architettura 10 (1955)
8-11
PI.
L. RICHARDSON JR
