Acropolis of Alatri historical timeline

The acropolis is the oldest thing in Alatri and the least firmly dated. Its circuit of polygonal megaliths encloses 19,000 square metres on the summit of the town's hill, and the published datings range from before 1539 B.C. to the third century B.C. What followed is documented: a Roman censor plumbed it, a medieval quarter grew inside it and was demolished by order, a bishop's palace replaced that quarter, and a pope's visit paid for the road that still rings it. Stand at the Porta Maggiore and the 27-tonne architrave above your head is undated; the stairway under your feet is from 1843.

Chronology

1. c. 550 B.C. Aletrium joins Veroli, Anagni and Ferentino in a Hernican defensive league against the Volsci and the Samnites. The acropolis is the league town's citadel, and its walls are the only structure of that alliance still standing anywhere.
2. 530 B.C. The Hernici ally with the Rome of Tarquinius Superbus. Etruscan influence shows up in the archaeology of the site from about this period.
3. 306 B.C. Rome defeats Alatri and imposes citizenship. The town becomes a municipium -- it is one in Cicero's day and stays one through the imperial centuries -- so the acropolis loses its military point and keeps its sacred one.
4. 2nd century B.C. The censor Lucius Betilienus Varus has a list of public works built and records them in an epigraph. One is a lacus ad portam, and the cistern found beside the Porta Maggiore during recent work on the via Gregoriana -- then reburied -- is thought to be it.
5. 528 Benedict stays briefly in the monastic community that the patrician Liberius had promoted here under Theodoric, among the oldest in the West.
6. 543 Totila's troops sack and destroy Alatri during the Gothic Wars. The walls survive what the town does not, which is the pattern for the next fifteen centuries.
7. 1326 The quarter that had grown inside the fortified acropolis is destroyed on the order of the rector of Campagna e Marittima, after the expulsion of Francesco de Ceccano, who had occupied it. Only ruins of those houses have been found; from here on the enclosure carries the cathedral and the bishop's palace and nothing else.
8. 1337-1342 The bishop's palace is rebuilt. Its cellars hold a prison, and the walled garden beside it serves as a cemetery.
9. 1843 For the visit of Gregory XVI the citizens of Alatri work ten consecutive days clearing the walls and building an access to the upper town, cutting the road that runs right round the circuit. It is named the via Gregoriana for him, and the stairway up to the Porta Maggiore dates from the same campaign.
10. 1846 The cemetery in the bishop's garden stops being used. The walled garden is still there against the palace.
11. 1900s Long rows of trees are planted across the esplanade inside the walls, and a stone building is raised against the cathedral to hide a water tank. The acropolis has been the town's park ever since.

Survival and restoration

Nothing has had to save these walls, which is the unusual part. They are dry-laid megaliths quarried from the hill they stand on, fitted without lime or cement, and they have outlasted the Gothic sack of 543, the demolition of the quarter inside them in 1326 and every rebuilding on the summit since. The two gates are intact, including the Porta Minore's corridor with its nine corbelled monoliths.

The nineteenth century is what changed the experience of the site rather than the site itself. The 1843 campaign cleared vegetation off the circuit, opened an access to the upper town and made the perimeter road, and the stairway at the Porta Maggiore belongs to it -- so the approach a visitor uses is Victorian, not ancient. Ferdinand Gregorovius, who came through soon after, wrote admiringly of the scale and the preservation of the enclosure. The twentieth century added the trees and the disguised water tank.

What is being lost is the carving. The three phalli over the Porta Minore are described as deteriorated by time, and the winged figure on the Pizzale's base cornerstone is worn enough that it is also read as a solar globe -- the dispute over the image is partly a dispute about how much of it is left.

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