Porta Montanara Gate
About
Roman colonists built this gate around 82 BCE, in the wall circuit raised after Sulla's civil war, giving Ariminum a fortified southern entrance still standing in 117 CE. Its arch used double rows of stone voussoirs cut from Covignano hillside sandstone. World War Two bombing tore the gate apart, but restorers rebuilt its surviving barrel vault at street level in 2004. It once carried the name Porta Sant'Andrea.
What happened here
The gate is where a town shows itself and where it counts what comes in. Traffic is funnelled between towers into arched passages — the wide ones for carts, the narrow ones for people — and closed at night with timber leaves shod in iron. A customs post takes duty on goods; a clerk records what passes. The outward face is the decorated one, with an inscription naming the emperor and the town, because this is the first thing a visitor reads. Guards are usually the town's own watchmen rather than soldiers. Just outside, the tombs begin; just inside, the shops. In a town whose walls have long stopped mattering militarily, the gate is kept up anyway, for the look of the thing.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →