We now come to the next Porta Romana, which connected Norcia with the so-called Eternal City. Let us discover the hidden history and what events link this small village with Rome.

Historical sources tell of a special connection between the Romans and the Sabines, which occurred after the famous Rape of the Sabine women, one of the oldest events in the history of Rome, shrouded in legend. According to tradition, Romulus, the legendary figure to whom the founding of Rome was attributed, after founding the city, turned to the neighbouring peoples, such as the Sabines, to make alliances and obtain women with whom to procreate and populate the new town. To the neighbours’ refusal he responded with deception: he organised a great spectacle to attract the region’s inhabitants and kidnap their women. But, of course, this meant only one thing, and that was war.

It was precise during the clamour of the battle that the Sabine women, who had been kidnapped earlier by the Romans, threw themselves in a shower of ‘bullets’ between the opposing factions to divide the contenders and appease their violence and anger. With this gesture, both sides stopped and entered a peace treaty that sanctioned the union between the two peoples with a commonality of power and citizenship. The peace was ratified by their respective kings, Romulus and Titus Tatius, who jointly ruled the city for five years, and the Sabines settled on the Quirinal Hill in Rome.

However, as Roman power expanded, all the surrounding kingdoms were soon wholly subjugated to the yoke of Rome.

At the beginning of the 3rd century BCE, the city was conquered by the Romans, obtained Roman citizenship and was aggregated into the Quirine tribe; Roman tribes according to tradition had been established by King Romulus and grouped citizens first on a family basis then on a territorial basis).

Later, in the 1st century BCE civil war between Octavian and Mark Antony, Norcia allied with the latter and shared his ill fortune following his defeat at the Battle of Actium. Finally, with the rise to power of the Sabine-born emperor Vespasian in the second half of the 1st century CE, the city became known as Nursia Valeria. The fame of this period is mainly linked to the products of the countryside, to the harshness of the climate that earned it the Virgilian epithet ‘frigid’, and to that of its most illustrious sons, above all, the republican general Sertorius and the emperor Vespasian’s mother, Vespasia Polla.

Cammino di San Benedetto