At dusk, swallows swoop from the rafters of the church and weave intricate patterns above the sun-warmed terracotta roofs, soundtracked by the chatter of TV sets behind windows thrown wide open. Yet Anguillara Sabazia wears its antiquity lightly. Archaeologists in scuba gear have discovered more than 3,000 oaken posts, which wer once used to support their houses. The town takes its name from the Roman villa that is buried somewhere beneath its erratically cobbled streets, but there is something more historic still only a few hundred yards outside the village, submerged like a dark secret in the mud of Lake Bracciano.įive thousand years before the creation of Rome, neolithic travellers from Greece or the Arab world found their way to this spot and brought with them a seismic shift: unlike the nomadic hunter-gatherers who populated the region at the time, they farmed, kept domesticated animals and created what must at the time have been a staggeringly large settlement, unprecedented within Italy. This much is obvious when you first glimpse it – a tumble of medieval houses, painted shutters gaping, scattered down the hillside like a handful of rolled dice.
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