Aquileia

The Story Behind the Place

Aquileia was founded in 181 BC as a Latin colony — a fortress to hold the Alpine passes and the warlike Carni and Istri in check — on the edge of the lagoons at the mouth of the Natissa. Its position made it instantly rich: it became the outlet to the sea for the whole Danube basin, the western terminus of the amber route, and by the age of Augustus the capital of the Tenth Italian region, with perhaps a hundred thousand inhabitants, a mint, an imperial palace and the largest warehouse district of the northern Adriatic. Its roads — the Via Annia and the Via Julia Augusta — made it the hub of northeastern Italy. Christianity arrived early and triumphantly: the bishop Theodorus built the great basilica around 314, immediately after Constantine’s edict, and Aquileia became the mother church of the Adriatic, spreading the faith into Noricum, Pannonia and the Danube provinces; its bishops were later called patriarchs, and the Patriarchate of Aquileia survived as a polity into the 18th century. In 452 Attila the Hun burned the city — the flight of its survivors into the lagoons is the founding legend of both Grado and, by extension, Venice — and though it was rebuilt, the salt road rerouted and the sea slowly retreated, the city never recovered its rank. A Lombard siege in 590, an earthquake, and the rise of Venice completed the fade: by the Middle Ages Aquileia was a village on its own ruins. That catastrophe is what makes it priceless today — the buried city, unexcavated beneath the fields, is the most complete early-Roman urban landscape anywhere in the Mediterranean world, inscribed by UNESCO in 1998.