Tag: Todi

My earlier post on Roman Todi discussed the process by which this independent Umbrian city beside the Tiber, on the boundary with Etruscan territory, came under Roman rule. I will now look at some Roman architecture and civil engineering, remains of which can still be seen in Todi today.

Gates, Tombs and Temples

Let us start by assuming that we are approaching Roman Todi from the south, along the Via Amerina. I wrote about the Via Amerina in this article, but here again is a view south from Todi. Note that the road that goes up the hill is a later medieval road – the Roman-era road runs along the floor of the valley to the right, beside the little river Arnata.

The picture below is an illustration in Todi e I Suoi Castelli by Franco Mancini, published in 1960 but still in print (the illustration is attributed to one G. Tenneroni). It shows an elevated view of Todi from the south, and I will be referring to it in this article. The photograph above was taken from roughly the position marked by the figure 5 in the drawing, with the Via Amerina the road that comes up towards the town at the bottom.

The map labels the three circles of the city walls as E for Etruscan (obviously in 1960 people still referred to the pre-Roman Umbrian period in Todi as Etruscan), R for Roman, and a dotted line marked M for Medieval. Frustratingly, it is hard to find agreement on when the “Roman” walls were built. Some date them to the time when Todi first became part of the Roman world in the 2^nd Century BC, others to after Todi became a colonia in the 1^st Century BC. The first ever source I encountered called them tardo-Romano, that is from the late Roman period when they would have been needed for defence against the invading Goths, in the 6^th Century AD. Even if the walls were already in existence then, a hasty program of repairs seems plausible.

The route of the Via Amerina through the town is unchanged from antiquity. Here is a picture taken from Google Maps, on which I have marked its route.

It is a long straight climb from the valley floor up to the town. As we saw in the first post in this series – Ancient Todi – Before the Romans, the southern slope of Todi’s hill was the site of a pre-Roman necropolis. In my mind’s eye I see this as a bit like the Etruscan necropolis we visited at Sarteano in 2018, where the tomb entrances take the form of long passages cut into the hillsides, giving the dead a nice view, as it were. If the pre-Roman tombs in Todi were like this, the passages would presumably have been clearly visible on either side as we ascended the hill.

It is likely that the area continued to be used for tombs, as the Romans also had the sensible rule that forbade burials inside city limits,. But their tombs looked different. Going by what we have seen on the Via Appia outside Rome, at Pompeii and close to Todi at Carsulae, they built monumental tombs above the ground. During the Republican and early Imperial periods, these were usually to hold the ashes of the deceased rather than the body, with inhumation becoming common later under the influence of eastern religions, including Christianity.

The remains of funerary monuments have also been found along the Via Amerina on the northern side of Todi, near the present Porta Perugina on the road towards Perugia. There are no standing remains of Roman above-ground tombs around Todi of which I am aware, but several fragments have come to light over the years and are preserved in the Civic Museum or the Lapidarium (of which more later).

Let us continue our imaginary approach to Todi. We would enter the town through the Porta Aurea, in the second circle of walls. The gate still exists, although like all of Todi’s gates, the upper parts are medieval or later, reflecting the need to keep them in good defensive repair.

Once through the Porta Aurea, on our right we would pass a temple on the site of the present church of Santa Maria in Cammuccia (sometimes spelled Camuccia; no one knows what it means), which was dedicated either to Venus or Minerva, depending on which local tradition you follow. That there was a Roman temple there seems clear enough – part of it has been incorporated into the façade of the medieval church, and re-dedication to the Virgin Mary of temples of both Venus and Minerva seems to have been fairly common. But I have not been able to find an authoritative source – I asked ChatGPT for one but it directed me to one of my own blog posts, which is not exactly a peer-reviewed publication. Moreover, while I agree that I am not an authority, I thought ChatGPT’s tone was a little condescending (only a photo blog, after all).

The Gate of Mars

Continuing, both the ancient and the modern road then take a sharp left turn uphill and pass under a gate which was here before the Romans – the Porta Marzia, or Gate of Mars, in the pre-Roman walls (number 4 in the Mancini/Tenneroni drawing).

In the photograph below, you can see that the lower two courses of stones are of a size and regularity that one associates with pre-Roman work. In their book Todi: Storia ed Artistica, Carlo and Marco Grondona record that the stones were a source of wonder to the medieval inhabitants of the town. But I have been puzzled by them; closer inspection reveals that they look modern and are laid with mortar. The mystery was explained in the same book – apparently during work to re-pave the city streets the original stonework was damaged and had to be refaced. What a terrible shame – hundreds of cars pass through the gate every day and it would be very cool if they were passing authentic stonework from 2,400 years ago.

The Nicchioni

Now inside the very oldest boundaries of the city, to our right we pass a road that leads down to the old town marketplace, now a car park. Beside the Mercato Vecchio is one of the largest and most complete Roman structures in Todi – the Nicchioni (“big niches”).

Local tradition once had it that the Nicchioni were part of a temple of Mars, but the modern view of their function is more prosaic, yet in a way more impressive. They are thought to be nothing more than compression arches, supporting the immense weight of the buildings above. Through a couple of millennia of earthquakes and fears of subsidence they have stood there holding up people’s houses and shops, and they still do today.

The Forum and the Temple of Jupiter

Now we are at the highest point on the road, where it opened out into the forum. The modern Piazza del Popolo is in the same location, but is a good deal smaller than was the forum, as Renaissance palaces have encroached on the western side, and the duomo on the northern side.

The picture below, of a panel on display in the piazza, shows the Roman forum as a rectangular dotted line, with the medieval and renaissance buildings superimposed (NB: north is on the left).

The main temple in Roman Todi is always described as having been a temple of Jupiter – I don’t know whether there is evidence for this or whether it is assumed that the principal temple would always have been dedicated to the chief of the gods. In the drawing near the top of this article, it is shown at the top, next to the letter E.

These days the approximate site is occupied by the duomo, and if you go down into the crypt you can see a few bits of stone dating from the late-Roman period. However to the non-expert eye any remains of the Roman temple, and indeed of the Lombard-era church that replaced it, have been obliterated by the medieval Romanesque building that was begun around 1100 and largely completed by around 1300. A bit further up the hill behind the duomo there are some Roman remains but they are only partly visible in an overgrown pit covered by a thick glass plate.

The Cisterns

The most remarkable Roman remains in Todi are not immediately visible – they are the cisterns that lie underneath the Piazza del Popolo. You see, the flat expanse that was the forum and is now the piazza, and which carries the weight of buildings, cars, concert stages and the occasional baffling modern sculpture, is not only entirely artificial, but also partly hollow. The original space was a saddle between two hills – the Romans excavated it further, built two rows of giant concrete cisterns, then filled it all in and paved over the top. The Roman paving is still there, only a few inches beneath the modern surface.

If you look back at the diagram of the forum further up, you can see two lines of twelve connected rectangles – these are the cisterns. If you go into the tourist office and pay a few euros, you can visit them. The picture below, taken from an illuminated information panel in the cisterns themselves, shows the method of construction: wooden formwork created a space into which concrete could be poured to make the lower walls, then the formwork was raised, allowing concrete to fill the space between the cisterns, then finally a barrel vault was constructed, over which more concrete was poured, with stone wells at the top through which water could drain into the cisterns, or be drawn up from above. The timber must then have been removed from within, and the cisterns allowed to fill with rainwater, or from aqueducts fed by springs.

The two sets of twelve cisterns were not connected – according to one of the guides this was to prevent any contamination of one set affecting the other.

At some point after the fall of Rome, the cisterns were forgotten. The eastern line (the line that runs down the middle of the modern piazza) was rediscovered some time before the mid-13^th Century, but – remarkably – the western line was not rediscovered until the 1990s, during renovations to the tobacconist’s shop in the corner of the piazza. Today there is a thick glass tile in the floor of the tobacconist, through which you can look down. And from below in the cisterns, you can look up and see the feet of customers in the shop.

After the fall of the Western Empire, the aqueducts that the Romans built inside the hill fell into disrepair (which later created significant subsidence problems as the hill became waterlogged). But in the early 1600s Bishop Angelo Cesi commissioned an elegant fountain, the Fonte Cesia, featuring the legendary eagle of Todi and fed by water from one of the Roman aqueducts. If you go and have a gelato or an aperitivo at the excellent Bar Pianegiani, you will be sitting in front of the fountain, and in the wall beside it you will see a wooden access door. Behind it is the tunnel built in the 17^th Century to divert the water to the fountain from the Roman aqueduct.

The Theatre and Amphitheatre

Like any Roman town, Todi had places of public entertainment. A theatre was located near the forum, just below the modern Piazza Garibaldi – and like the Piazza Garibaldi it would have had magnificent views across to the Martani Hills. Very little of it remains now, at least that can be seen by the public. Apparently there are a few more bits in someone’s garden.

The remains of Todi’s amphitheatre, on the other hand, are comparatively substantial. Parts of it stick out of the medieval walls near the Porta Romana, and some modern streets and buildings trace its outline. It can be clearly seen at the lower right of the Mancini/Tenneroni drawing. The remains of both the theatre and the amphitheatre are easily distinguished from the medieval stone, because they are of concrete, which was not used in the Middle Ages. The Romans were great users of concrete, as we saw with the cisterns, but by the time the medieval walls came to be built the recipe had been forgotten, and a satisfactory new recipe was not found until the 18^th Century.

Another substantial bit of concrete work is the so-called Carcere di San Cassiano (prison of St Cassianus) which is in the grounds of the Franciscan monastery that is now a high school. The Cassianus in question, of whom little is known, is said to have been an early Christian martyr in Todi and is one of the town’s patron saints. Archaeologists tell us that the “prison” was actually a building over a well, but as the traditional site of the saint’s imprisonment before martyrdom, it was converted into a chapel dedicated to him, and thus preserved.

Odd Bits of Stone and Bronze

There are two other places in town worth visiting for the seeker after ancient things. They are the civic museum in the Palazzo del Popolo and the Lapidarium in the Convent of the Lucrezie. The former holds an eclectic collection, including the replica of the “Mars of Todi” that I mentioned in the article on pre-Roman Todi and also a saddle which belonged to Anita Garibaldi. The citizens of Todi gave her a new one as she, her husband and their small band of troops passed through while escaping northward from Rome in 1849.

The Lapidarium is not always open at the advertised times, but if it isn’t you can always go and enquire at the tourist office; they might send someone round to open it up.

Update: If you pay close attention, you may spot other signs of the Roman presence in Todi. The picture below was taken at the annual festival of San Fortunato in 2025.

The city of Todi became Roman not through conquest, but in stages. In an earlier article titled Ancient Todi – Before the Romans I talked about its legendary origins, its martial character and some of the remains of the pre-Roman period that can still be seen in the town. Now I propose to take the story forward into a period in which written records paint a much clearer picture.

According to the classic mock-history 1066 and All That by Sellar and Yeatman, every important event in history was either A Good Thing or A Bad Thing. So I found myself wondering whether becoming part of the Roman Empire, and more particularly becoming a colonia, was A Good Thing or A Bad Thing.

The conventional view of the Roman period which I absorbed as a child was partly based, at one or two removes, on the histories of ancient Roman writers themselves (in which the Romans, naturally, were the heroes), and partly on the views of Edward Gibbon, who wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.”

Such were the traditions that shaped my early impressions of Ancient Rome. Moreover it occurs to me that what I read was largely written by Englishmen of the first half of the 20^th Century, who thought that being part of an empire was A Good Thing – civilisation, law, education, commerce, infrastructure and so forth (cue the inevitable “what have the Romans ever done for us?” reference from Monty Python).

An equivalent child in the 21^st Century would read a somewhat different story. Modern revisionist historians, even if not actually post-Marxists, have thoroughly absorbed the zeitgeist and tend to start from the position that empires and colonies were A Bad Thing. This, I feel, is as solipsistic as anything written by a Cambridge don from 1900 who was projecting the British Empire onto the Roman. Or indeed by Kipling. His Roman centurions on Hadrian’s Wall in Puck of Pook’s Hill could have come straight from an English public school.

Either way, the Roman Empire happened, and the political views of people two thousand years later will not alter that.

My starting point was wondering what it would be like for people in places like Todi to come under Roman hegemony. The first stage in this was that Todi became a civitas foederata, for which I think “allied city” would be a better translation than “federated city”. From what I can tell, this meant that the city remained self-governing, but was bound by a formal treaty under which Rome took control of its foreign relations, and it was obliged to provide men to the Roman army. Since this happened to Todi in the 3^rd Century BC, our records of how this happened are not as complete as we would like, but it is known that a coalition of Etruscans, Umbrians and others was defeated at the battle of Sentium in 295 BC. Of course Umbria was a region, not a unitary state, so in the absence of hard information we cannot say whether that coalition included the city of Todi or not.

However a date that is most often given for this change of status is 217 BC. As far as I can tell there is no primary source for this, but it seems that historians have inferred it from various other changes that happened in the region after the Second Punic War and Hannibal’s invasion (I recently read that after Hannibal’s victory at Trasimene, his Carthaginian army came south along the west bank of the Tiber, passing through the village of Cecanibba, just to the north of Todi).

The next stage in Todi’s absorption into to the Roman world was in 89 BC when it became a municipium. This was during the so-called Social War of 91-87 BC when various allied states (soci) rose up against Rome. These states were mostly in the lands south of Rome, and I believe that Umbria was only peripherally involved. Paradoxically, the war ended with most people in central and southern Italy, even some who had fought Rome, being granted Roman citizenship. The late-Roman historian Arrian used this to argue that the desire for equal treatment with Rome was the root cause of the war (modern historians differ, of course).

The big thing about your city becoming a municipium was that while your city continued to be sort of self-governing, you became a Roman citizen, with a set of rights and responsibilities which included (for the knightly class and above)  the right of appeal against actions of local officials.

By contrast, Roman overseas subject territories were governed by officials who could, and often did, enrich themselves through rapacious taxation. Most of what we know of this system comes from the letters of two of the honest ones – Cicero and Pliny the Younger. The late-republican senator Cicero accepted the post of governor of Cilicia in Asia Minor with great reluctance, and his letters document the excesses of his predecessor. Then later he famously prosecuted the venal ex-governor of Sicily for corruption and extortion. 160 years later, Pliny was appointed governor of Bithynia, also in Asia Minor, by the Emperor Trajan. We saw the remains of Pliny’s Umbrian country villa in this article.

The next stage in the absorption of Todi into Rome (by which time it must already have been completely Romanised) was in 42 BC under the Emperor Augustus, when it was granted colonia status with the title Colonia Julia Fida Tuder. I’m guessing, although I do not know, that the “fida” meant that Todi had been faithful to Octavian/Augustus in the civil war against Mark Antony, in which Perugia famously picked the wrong side and was razed to the ground. If I am right, it would be by no means the last time that Todi and Perugia were on different sides.

Being a citizen of a colonia effectively meant that you were now Roman. There would have been plenty of advantages, but a downside was that discharged Roman legionaries could be granted land on your territory. Of course some of those legionaries might also have been recruited from your territory, so there would always have been winners and losers.

Among the winners were ancient Todi families called the Ulpii and the Traii, members of which joined the Roman army and rose to senatorial rank. From a marriage between the clans came Marcus Ulpius Traianus, who became the Emperor Trajan in AD 98. Although he was actually born in Spain and spent his whole life on the move, Todi ever since has claimed him as a local boy. According to some accounts (and local tradition), the Colonia Julia Fida Tuder title was actually granted by Trajan rather than Augustus, although this seems unlikely.

At the end of the previous article on ancient Todi, we left Todi as a prosperous Umbrian city on the border with Etruria, with strong Etruscan cultural influences but (probably) not under actual Etruscan rule. Its world was shaped by warfare and it stood ready to defend itself. Three centuries later, it was a still-prosperous Roman city in an economically important region of central Italy, but it was now at peace and would remain so for four hundred years. Maybe those 19th-Century historians weren’t all that wrong about the Pax Romana.

In future articles, I propose first to look at some of the impressive Roman engineering that can still be seen in Todi, and then to consider the fortunes of the town at the end of the empire and the Gothic Wars of the 5^th Century.

Edit: that article on Roman Engineering in Todi has been written and can be found here.

Todi is a town in Umbria, rising on a rugged hilltop beside the River Tiber. These days it is known for its almost perfectly-preserved medieval town centre, but there are traces of a far more ancient town, and many of them are not hard to find.

Todi has two things that marked it as a good site for a town – firstly a steep defensible hill, and secondly, despite its height above the valley, it is a hill on which there are sources of fresh water. Water falls on the Martani mountains to the east and seeps down through the limestone, but then gets trapped under a layer of impermeable clay in the valley, where it builds up pressure. Todi’s hill is a plug of limestone up through which the water is forced, emerging in multiple places as springs. In addition, wells could easily be sunk through the soft rock.

So it was the obvious place for a settlement, and there are signs of there having been continuous occupation since Neolithic times, when the river valley below was variously swampy or even inundated by a huge lake.

The Legend of the Eagle

However the foundation myth of Todi is a bit more elaborate. According to the story, Todi was originally intended to be built by the banks of the Tiber, and after the first morning’s work, the builders stopped for lunch (that part is believable, at any rate). But as soon as the tablecloth was laid, an eagle swooped down, seized it, and carried it away to the top of the hill. Augurs interpreted this event as a sign that the town should have been built up there, and so the plan was changed. And thus it also was that the eagle became emblematic of Todi. It is still on the town’s coat of arms.

Who knows how old that story is, but it may have been a medieval invention because the first recorded appearance of the eagle in a Todi context was not until 1267. It is conventionally represented as clutching the stolen tablecloth in its talons, and it is often also seen sheltering two eaglets under its wings; these represent the towns of Terni and Amelia, which were subject to Todi for a period in the 13^th Century, something of which modern Tuderti (Todi citizens) remain very proud.

I have come across one fascinating hint that the story might be older – a very ambiguous reference to the hill on which the Duomo now sits having been called the Nidola (nest) in Roman times.

Fanciful though it all is, I rather like the fact that the very first event recorded in Todi’s long story is… lunch.

Umbrians, not Etruscans

Turning from legend to things of which we are a bit more confident, it seems that in pre-Roman times the Tiber marked the boundary between the territories of the Etruscans and the Umbri, the latter – unlike the Etruscans – being an Indo-European people who spoke a language related to Latin. We actually have some examples of the ancient Umbrian language thanks to the improbable survival of the “Iguvine Tablets” of Gubbio, something else I intend to write about some day.

So Todi was a frontier town, and its very name – Latin Tuder, Umbrian Tutere, is said to come from a word meaning “border” (although whether that original word was Etruscan or Umbrian depends on which source you read). Away to the north on a clear day, in the 21st Century AD as in the 6^th Century BC, one can see Perugia, then the easternmost of the twelve cities of the original Etruscan league, and the Tiber winds down from the north as a constant reminder of the boundary between the two territories.

It is common in Todi to refer to anything from the pre-Roman era as “Etruscan”, which makes a sort of sense, as everyone knows that the Etruscans came before the Romans. So for example there is a Via Mura Etrusche which leads down to the pre-Roman walls, and many guidebooks assert that Todi was Etruscan. But as we have seen, it is not strictly accurate – Todi was Umbrian, not Etruscan. A couple of years ago we went on a guided walk through Todi organised by the Fondo Ambiente Italiano (a bit like the UK’s National Trust). The guide was a pleasant and very knowledgeable chap who pointed out many interesting things, but he got quite agitated when someone (not us, fortunately) referred to the pre-Roman period in Todi as ”Etruscan”. It was obviously a sensitive subject for him.

So what were the ancient Umbri like, apart from not being Etruscan? Well, according to a 2020 genetic analysis, quite like the modern Umbrians, it seems. In one way that’s not surprising – we talk about this culture having replaced that culture, but unless mass slaughter is involved (and it wasn’t in Italy), the people go on, and so the blood of the ancient Umbri and Etruscans obviously runs in the veins of modern Umbrians.

In another way it’s a bit unusual, because by and large Italians in most regions are anything but ethnically homogeneous – many waves of invasions, from the ancient Gauls to the Lombards and the Normans, have seen to that. Culturally, we can expect  that the Umbrian inhabitants of Tutere would have shared a lot with their Etruscan neighbours – not just because of proximity but because they were at a similar stage of technological development.

Certainly, like most other Bronze Age cultures, they seemed to live in a society shaped by warfare. Apart from the obvious fact of having built their towns on defensible hills (whether or not eagles told them to), there are some other clues. The Iguvine Tablets from Gubbio make several references to enemies.

Military equipment – Bronze swords, spear tips and helmets – also survive. Another clue is that in local museums you can see votive figures retrieved from sacred springs, where supplicants prayed to the gods for assistance. Some figures represent pregnant women, obviously offered in the hope of conceiving or of having a safe childbirth. But an awful lot of them clearly represent warriors, with plumed helmets and shields, and in aggressive stances. Not the sort of offering you would make if you were praying for a good harvest, but one you might make if you were hoping to come home alive from a battle in order to bring the harvest in. While most are tiny little figurines, the most famous and elaborate of such offerings is the so-called “Mars of Todi”.

This extraordinary life-size bronze statue, dated to the 5^th or 4^th Century BC, was dug up in 1835 at a place just outside Todi called Montesanto which at various times has been a monastery and a castle, and in ancient times was very likely some sort of religious precinct. Unfortunately for Todi, anything like that which came to light during the centuries of Papal domination went straight to the Vatican, which is where the Mars of Todi remains; what you can see in Todi’s Civic Museum is a facsimile made in the 1990s and paid for by a local citizens group. (That is one of the reasons why the local museum has such a comparatively poor showing: the other is what Italian historians call the “Napoleonic Despoliation”, when French troops methodically stripped northern and central Italy of the artworks that are now mostly in the Louvre. It’s strange – people go on and on about the Elgin Marbles, but no-one ever asks the French to give anything back. However I digress.)

The armoured figure, with (now missing) spear and helmet, was at first identified as a god of war, hence the name “Mars of Todi”. But modern scholars, pointing to the fact that the statue’s right hand probably held a libation bowl (the facsimile in my photograph is holding such a bowl, but that is not in the original), more plausibly suggest that this depicts a human warrior making an offering to the gods before battle. It was found under blocks of travertine stone, so it was deliberately buried. Whether it was made to be buried as an offering, or that was something that happened to it later, we will never know.

It is believed to have been made in the Etruscan city of Orvieto, a manufacturing centre for such bronzes, and it carries an inscription in Umbrian characters saying that it was a gift from someone called Ahal Trutitis. This is said to be a name of possible Celtic origin (the Celts, whom we now associate with Britain and Ireland, started out probably in central Europe and, as the Gauls, invaded Italy in about the 5^th Century BC, not long before the statue was made). So someone, living in Todi and speaking Umbrian but perhaps of foreign ancestry, was wealthy enough to commission what must have been an extremely expensive artefact from Etruscan craftsmen, possibly to seek divine assistance in a war against someone. It is all rather tantalising.

It does tell us that the area was wealthy and that despite wars, societies traded with each other as they always have. Some of those trade links were surprisingly extended. On the southern slopes of Todi, near where you now see the Renaissance church of La Consolazione, an extensive pre-Roman necropolis or burial area was discovered in the 19^th Century.

Most of the objects found here in the 19^th Century were dispersed to collections elsewhere in Italy or overseas, but finds continue to be made. On the road which runs beside the south side of Todi’s medieval walls (Via Orvietana) is a rather ugly modern building which houses among other businesses a CONAD supermarket.

It was in 2007, while excavating for the foundations of this building, that they found pre-Roman graves containing many fine glass bowls of Alexandrian manufacture. These did not end up very far away and you can see some of them in an excellent display at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia.

The most obvious reminder of Todi’s pre-Roman era, however, is in the stones that make up the first of the town’s three circles of walls.

Todi’s first circle of walls dates, I understand, from the 6^th or 5^th Century BC, the second circle from the Roman period – some sources say in the late Republican period, others around the time of the Gothic invasion of the 6^th Century AD – and the third is a rank newcomer from around 1200. The two later circles are largely complete and I will probably write about them separately one day, but the first and most ancient wall is fragmentary – in many places there are no traces, while in others it was incorporated into later walls and kept repaired.

My final example of pre-Roman stonework is easy to miss, and one that I would love to say that I discovered for myself, but in fact I first came across a picture of it in a book. It is just below the summit of Todi’s hill, leading up to what is now a park on the site of the medieval Rocca Albornoz.

On first glance this is a stone wall that could have been built as a single edifice, but on closer inspection there is a discontinuity – a diagonal line running up from the lower right to the left of the photograph. Below that line, the lower part is a ramp built in the pre-Roman period leading up to the top of the hill. One can imagine processions heading up to the summit, as part of ceremonies for whatever gods the Umbri worshipped. Above that line, less regular than the ancient original, older stones were re-used in late Roman or early medieval times to turn the ramp into a wall. Further above that, several hundred years later, there was built a Franciscan monastery which now contains the town library and a high school, in the cloister of which they put on concerts in summer. And so the life of the town continues, on the most ancient of foundations.

Sources

My qualifications for writing this are simply that I am interested, and that in walking around Todi with a camera I have learned to look for patterns in the stone and ask myself what stories they tell. The guided walk sponsored by FAI was a good source, as is the municipal museum and the explanatory texts in it, while the Museo Archeologico Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia is excellent and well worth a visit. There is a section on local history in the town library (in the old monastery above the pre-Roman ramp illustrated above). We have found a couple of books in Italian which deal mainly in later art and architecture but which refer peripherally to the ancient period. These are Todi, storica ed artistica, written in 1961 by Carlo Grondona and updated and republished in 2009 by his son Marco.

Another, dealing only with a couple of town districts, is TODI: i ‘rioni’ S. Prassede e S. Silvestro, Catalogo delle opere d’arte by Castrichini  et al., 1999. One chapter by Lorena Battistoni deals with the Roman and Medieval history of the districts.

In English there is not so much. Umbria, A Cultural Guide by Ian Campbell Ross, 1996, from which I have quoted before, has a couple of chapters dealing with the prehistoric and pre-Roman ages in Umbria generally, although he concentrates more on Perugia and its Etruscan history than he does on the Umbri.

A slim book called Todi Walking Tours, self-published in 2018 by Bernard Mansheim and Claudio Peri is available in local bookstores. It is a good way to make an initial acquaintance of the town, although some of the historical assertions in it are debatable.

I intend to follow this post in due course with one on Todi in the Roman era, of which there are more substantial remains than from the pre-Roman.

Edit: since writing this post I have acquired a third book in Italian about the history of Todi: Todi e i Suoi Castelli by Franco Mancini, 1960. It promises to be a very useful source, although the somewhat ornate style in which it is written is going to make reading and translating it rather slow going. Also since writing this post, I have followed up with two more: Roman Todi 1 – Becoming Roman, and Roman Todi 2 – Architecture and Engineering.