Notes on Southern Etruria and the Ager Veientanus

Abstract

The notes that follow are the first results of a programme of field-survey undertaken by the writer and by various members of the British School during the autumn of 1954 in the area that lies immediately to the north of Rome, between the Tiber and the sea. This area is one that has been strangely neglected by modern students of Italian topography. Ashby's published work is concerned mainly with those parts of the Campagna that lie to the south and east of Rome; and Tomassetti's work, invaluable as a repertory of manuscript and published sources, lays no claim to be a comprehensive survey of the material remains surviving on the ground.Such a survey is badly needed today. The romantic desolation of Southern Etruria is being transformed from one day to the next under the impact of a scheme of landreform comparable in scale to the great reforms of classical antiquity, and vast estates which for centuries have been used for stock-breeding and seasonal pasture are being broken up and brought into cultivation with all the devastating thoroughness that modern mechanical equipment entails. Whole regions are accessible today as they have never been before, and within them the bulldozer and the mechanical plough are busy destroying whatever lies in their path.