How Palestrina was built and evolved over time

The sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia is the reason Palestrina is shaped as it is, and the way it was built is what makes it important.

It was built on a series of terraces on the slope of the hill on which the town stands, climbing the hillside rather than occupying a level platform. And it did not stop at the sanctuary: further massive Roman terraces support the town itself.

Its design is a hybrid. The sanctuary ranks among the masterpieces of Roman architecture of the Republican period, influenced in its scenographic arrangement of terraces by Hellenistic work — Greek theatre-building logic applied to a hillside — but realised by taking full advantage of the constructional technique of cementizio, Roman concrete. It is Greek stagecraft executed in a material the Greeks did not have.

The dating has been revised. The most recent studies place the sanctuary in the last decades of the second century BC, and the construction of a forum and the monumentalisation of the oracular sanctuary are both dated to the end of that century.

Beneath and above it are older works: the earliest settlement was probably a citadel on the hilltop, ringed by a cyclopean wall of which some remains today, with two walls of the same date descending the slopes.

And the fortifications were serious enough to be part of the town's prosperity — imposing works defending an obligatory passage between Lazio and southern Italy.