Alatri and Arpino: Walls Nobody Can Date

Two towns about thirty kilometers apart in southern Lazio, Alatri and Arpino, are built on top of walls made of limestone blocks the size of small cars, fitted together without mortar and still holding after more than two thousand years. Both sit on hills in Ciociaria, both can be seen in one day by car, and both raise the same question as soon as you stand under them, which is how old they actually are. The honest answer is that specialists disagree, and the range of their disagreement is about seven centuries.

How old are the cyclopean walls of Lazio?

They are called cyclopean because later Greeks and Romans, looking at blocks that size, decided only the Cyclopes could have lifted them. Archaeologists call them polygonal walls, from the irregular shapes that are cut to fit each other.

The dating is the part to get right, because the popular versions are generous. Treccani, the Italian national encyclopedia, dates the polygonal walls of the lower town at Alatri to the end of the fourth century BC, which makes them roughly 2,300 years old. Local tradition puts the acropolis itself earlier, around the seventh century BC, and attributes it to the Hernici, the Italic people whose chief towns these were. At Arpino the argument is sharper still: one line of scholarship places the walls in the seventh or sixth century BC, another reads them as Roman work.

So the range runs from about 2,700 years old to something built under Rome. You will read "three thousand years" on signs and in brochures. Nobody has evidence for that, and the walls do not need it. They are the oldest standing thing most visitors to this region will ever touch, and the argument about their age is part of what makes them interesting.

As for the question people ask next: yes, these walls are older than the Colosseum, which was finished in AD 80, by several centuries at least.

Alatri: the acropolis on top of the town

Alatri was Aletrium, one of the towns of the Hernici, and it stayed loyal to Rome when the rest of the Hernici revolted in 306 BC. It is now a town of about 28,000 people, and its acropolis is an artificial-looking plateau at the top, ringed by walls built straight onto the rock of the hill.

The gate to aim for is the Porta Maggiore, on the southern side: four and a half meters high, two and a half wide, and roofed by a single monolithic block about five meters long and estimated at 27 tons. Local guides like to say it is second in Europe only to the Lion Gate at Mycenae, which is the kind of claim that travels better than it verifies, but the block is there and the size is not in dispute. On the front of it there are three carved figures whose meaning has been argued over for two centuries and is generally read as belonging to a fertility cult.

The second gate, the Porta Minore, is smaller and reached by a lane. Between them runs the circuit you can walk in half an hour, with the valley opening below on every side. The medieval town underneath is worth the rest of the morning: stone houses, a few tower houses including the one named after Cardinal Gottifredo, and no tour groups at all.

Arpino: a pointed arch from before the pointed arch

Arpino was a Volscian town, taken by Rome in 305 BC and a municipium from 90 BC. Today it has about 7,700 residents in the valley and on the hill, and what you climb for is Civitavecchia, the old acropolis at around 650 meters above the modern town.

Its walls are made of puddingstone, a natural conglomerate from the same hill, and the circuit originally ran about three kilometers, of which roughly half survives. The thing to see is the gate: an arch over four meters high with a pointed profile, built by corbelling the blocks inward until they meet. The province of Frosinone calls it the only surviving arch of its type in the Mediterranean. Pointed arches become normal in Europe seventeen hundred years later, with Gothic architecture, which is why this one looks like a mistake in a timeline and why photographs of it circulate without their captions.

Arpino's other claim is a person. Cicero was born on January 3, 106 BC on his family's land in the territory of Arpino, at the point where the Fibreno runs into the Liri, and he called himself an Arpinate all his life. The general Gaius Marius came from here as well. A medieval tower in the valley is named after Cicero by tradition rather than by evidence, and the confluence where he was born is a green, cold, very quiet place that almost nobody visits.

If you only have time for one

Take Alatri if you want the single most impressive piece of masonry, an intact circuit you can walk, and a medieval town attached to it. Take Arpino if you want the strange one: the arch, the emptiness up at Civitavecchia, and the classical connection. Alatri is easier to reach and easier to park. Arpino asks for a car and a bit of patience on the last few kilometers.

Both are close to the water. The lake of Posta Fibreno and the waterfall in the middle of Isola del Liri are within half an hour of Arpino, which is why our journey in Ciociaria spends a day on villages and water and another on the wild part of the valley.

How to get to Alatri and Arpino

There is no useful train. Both towns are reached by car, and that is how they should be done, since the roads between them run through olive terraces and small villages that are half the point. Our guide to Italian villages explains how to pick which ones to stop in.

From Rome, the A1 motorway takes you to the Anagni-Fiuggi exit for Alatri, about an hour and a quarter in total. Arpino is farther south, off the Frosinone exit, about an hour and forty minutes from Rome. From one to the other is about forty minutes on provincial roads.

If you are already in the area, Anagni and Fiuggi are north of Alatri, and Monte Cassino is about forty minutes southeast of Arpino: our guide to visiting Monte Cassino covers the abbey and the battlefield. Two days in this triangle is a real itinerary, and almost nobody makes it.

Why these towns are not on the lists

Because they are hard to sell in a sentence. There is no cathedral with a name everyone knows, no view that has been photographed a million times, no restaurant with a waiting list. There is a wall, and the wall is older than anything in Rome, and you can put your hand on it without buying a ticket or standing in a line.

That is the argument for this part of Italy, and it is the same argument our Ciociaria page makes with pictures. If you want a few days built around it, tell us what interests you in Design your trip.