Verona [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Verona, according to the attestation of Pliny the Elder, is a Rhaetian and Euganean city. In fact, it rose, before the Veneto was included in the Roman system, on a territory where three peoples and three civilizations met; Veneto, Rhaetian, Gallic. More precisely it appears that Verona represents the extreme southern ramification of a Rhaetian infiltration among Veneto populations to the east and Gallic to the West. The most ancient sign of the presence of Rome at Verona and in the Veneto is the route of the Via Postumia, largely realized by Spurius Posthumius Albinus, consul in 148 B.C. But even earlier, between 225 and 221 B.C., Veneti and Cenoman fought on the side of Rome in the war against the Gauls Insubres and Boii. Veneto forces then took part in the 2nd Punic War as allies of Rome against Hannibal's army. We have no monumental evidence of a pre-Roman Verona, which must have developed on what is now St. Peter's hill, in a point which offered a certain possibility of an easy ford across the river. The official act of birth of the city of Verona, as a settlement organized in accordance with the Roman urbanistic criterion is represented by the inscription to be seen on the republican Gate of the Lions, in which are mentioned the quattuorvirs who were responsible for the contracts and approved the various installations of the city: walls, gates, sewers (and then the streets). The presence of the quattuorvirs, magistrates who governed a Roman municipality, permits the dating of this operation around the year 49 B.C. when Verona, together with other cities of the Transpadana region, gained Roman citizenship. Right up until the war undertaken by Augustus in 16 B.C. against the Alpine populations, to settle the northern boundaries of Italy, and from the following constitution of the provinces of Raetia and Noricum (14 B.C.). Verona was on the line of the northern boundary of Italy, later substituted in this position by the city of Trento. Verona was to enjoy a particularly happy period under the empire of Claudius (41 - 54 A.D.) and that of Nero (54 - 68 A.D.) during which its city gates were renewed and it had the courtesy title of Colonia Augusta, renewed in 265 by the emperor Gallienus: Colonia Augusta Verona Nova Gallieniana. In the year 265, the hurried and tumultuous erection of a new circle of walls, which replaced the republican one in brick, by now completely inefficient after a long period of peace, returned Verona to a situation analogous to that of its origins, within a perimeter, corresponding to that of the Republican era, which sacrificed all the enlargement that the city had outside this exiguous boundary, during almost three centuries of industrious prosperity. The 4th Century was for Verona, as for that matter for a great part of the Empire, the period of the assertion of Christianity linked here with the work of the «coloured» Bishop S. Zeno, 8th in the city's series of Bishops, who died in 372. 3