Norba
Latin colony on the western scarp of the Monti Lepini, southeast of Rome above the Pontine Plain, its highest point standing at roughly 460 m. More than 2.5 km of mortarless polygonal limestone wall encloses about 38 hectares, reaching 12 m on the outer face where the ground falls away. The Porta Maggiore is framed by jambs over 8 m high and 4.3 m wide, with a semicircular bastion still standing to 13 m; two acropolis platforms carry temple foundations, and the shrine of Juno Lucina looks west across the plain to the sea. What makes Norba unusual is that it is dated : besieged in the civil war between Marius and Sulla, the inhabitants burned the town and killed themselves rather than surrender at the end of 82 BCE, and the site was never reoccupied. That makes it one of the few polygonal circuits sealed at a known year, and the natural control against which the contested Italian circuits at Orbetello, Alatri and Cefalù have to be measured. Conventional reading : member of the Latin League in 499 BCE, Roman colony from 492 BCE, the visible fabric assigned to the Roman period by the excavations begun in 1901. Independent reading : the same polygonal vocabulary found at the disputed sites appears here inside a securely dated context, which cuts both ways in the dating debate and is exactly why the comparison matters. Sparavigna has separately argued the street grid was laid out on solstitial alignments.
Walkthrough videos (1)
Norba: the Great Wall of Italy · Stone Riddles
Nearby sites
- Segni (Signia)12 km
- Alatri Acropolis35 km
- Alba Fucens66 km