The discoveries at Fosso dell'Incastro near Ardea are among the most significant to be made in Italy in recent decades. Well preserved under thick coastal dunes lay the remains of an impressive sanctuary, whose life started in the sixth century b.c.e. and continued in some form down to the late Roman period. This monumental cult place was almost certainly part of Castrum Inui, a harbour town controlled by Ardea and mentioned in the Aeneid (6.775; usually thought to be north of Rome because of an entry in Servius’ commentary, which must in fact be erroneous). Several preliminary reports have appeared in the last few years, and they have stimulated a healthy debate, revolving especially around the spectacular, if fragmentarily preserved, cycles of terracotta decoration. Now, with highly commendable promptness, the final publication of the excavation has appeared, as a volume of the venerable series Monumenti Antichi dei Lincei (in which, from Pithekoussai to Veii's Portonaccio temple, some of the greatest discoveries in Italian archaeology have been presented to the public). There is a lot to be happy about in this latest offering, beginning with its formation process: a generous and enriching collaboration between the relevant Soprintendenza and many university-based researchers, which has yielded excellent and timely fruits.
The large-format, lavishly illustrated volume exposes, with order and thoroughness, the results of a rescue excavation conducted in the early 2000s by F. Di Mario at Fosso dell'Incastro (which would derive from the ancient name, in the Inui castrum form). Over an area of about 1000 m2, the remains of three main cult places (together with some other service structures) were identified and brought to light. In many ways, the star find is the earliest of them, temple B, created in the late sixth century b.c.e. and rebuilt and expanded in the early fifth. A tantalising portion of the architectural terracottas, probably belonging to two separate phases, has also been recovered. In the early second century, a second temple, temple A, was added, while a shrine to Aesculapius was built in the Augustan period. This last cult place ended up being the longest-lived at the site, probably in connection with a statio that might have been part of the imperial infrastructure.
The archaic cult at Fosso dell'Incastro joins the distinguished ranks of major sanctuaries dotting the coastline of Latium and Southern Etruria (as well as the Tiber riverbanks). These include Lavinium, Pyrgi (near Caere), Gravisca (near Tarquinia), Ostia, Antium and, arguably, Sant'Omobono in the Forum Boarium of Rome. This regional phenomenon, which must have required unprecedented investment of resources, is a principal component in the emergence and rapid diffusion, between about 570 and 480 b.c.e., of temple structures with high stone podia and terracotta decoration, which would remain the standard for centuries. To state the obvious, before this time of transformative architectural innovation, there were no truly monumentalised shrines in the entire peninsula, outside Greek colonies. As a pivotal element of the ongoing urbanisation process, budding polities in Etruria and Latium built up existing cult places and created many new ones, defining an autonomous architectural tradition in the process (C. Potts, Religious Architecture in Latium and Etruria (2015)). Sites like Satricum illustrate well how in this period wattle-and-daub huts developed into rectangular temples built on a platform of tuff ashlars with wooden columns, mud walls and vividly painted terracotta revetments and statues. In some cases, these temples were meant to be focal centres of the urban space that was being defined by city walls. In others, they had instead the function of highlighting contact points between the growing city and the external world, typically located at some distance from the fortified area. The archaic sanctuary published in this volume evidently belongs to this second group.
A masterful concluding essay by M. Torelli places the Fosso dell'Incastro complex within the context of its peer coastal sanctuaries, at the same time building an argument for their similarity also in terms of religious ideas. What Torelli also reconstructs is the subtle criss-crossing of cultic connections between the gods worshipped at these temples. A fascinating, if slightly disquieting, new divine character emerges from these musings — a chthonic, black sun god who would appear in various forms in sanctuaries of this kind, creating a religious coastscape that undoubtedly influenced the movement of Tyrrhenian travellers. In this sense it is also significant that at some point the notion that Aeneas had landed at this sanctuary becomes part of his saga; with the mediation of the ambiguous figure of Indiges, the cult of the deified Aeneas (which was of course also thriving at Lavinium) probably became institutionalised at Castrum Inui as well.
The recurrence of connected religious presences along coastlines and other communication routes, even across ethnic boundaries, is a phenomenon that characterises the Mediterranean in the archaic period. It is enough to recall the case of Hercules (syncretised as Melkart in Punic sites), perhaps the most common harbour-related cult of the period (H. R. Neilson, Class. Bull. 82 (2006), 5–26). The functional benefit of these chains of cults is clearly to facilitate long-distance commerce, migration and contact by providing a religious middle ground to a disparate variety of travellers. In the absence of any kind of international or commercial law, common worship of similar deities was one of the few forces that could foster collaborative behaviours, which were essential, among other things, for the diffusion of those exotic prestige items that elites everywhere craved.
Budding cities, significantly, invested in these outward-looking sanctuaries very early in the urbanisation process. At Rome, the Sant'Omobono temple predates the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter by a generation or two. At many other major urban centres, the resources devoted to harbour cult places were at least equivalent to what was done in the centre of the city. The Fosso dell'Incastro complex now adds a significant and well-legible piece to this fascinating picture, while at the same time greatly enriching our understanding of the religious worldview that tied these manifestations together. Evidently, they represented an irreplaceable part of the process that led the western coast of central Italy to become one of the most vibrant urban systems of the entire Mediterranean.
