Forum novum, an ancient market town dating back to the Middle Republican age, gives the name, from the Augustan period until today, to the region of Sabina called Ager foronovanum, a name that identifies one of the most beautiful and characteristic parts of the Sabines' land.
This area, conquered by Consul Manio Curio Dentato in 290 BC. together with all the domains of the Sabines, belongs to the northern sector of the "Tiber Sabina", that we distinguish from the southern one, gravitating around Cures Sabini and which yet from the dawn of Roman civilization, entered the gravitation area of the future city, giving a contribution to the foundation of the city itself.
This "historical" distinction is connected - not by chance - to a geographical one: while the southern Sabina opens up directly onto the city, benefiting from the Mediterranean influence coming from the Tiber mouth in front, the Agro Foronovano is located in a more internal position, nestled amongst the limestone reliefs of the anti-Apennines. Once the Romans had conquered this land, they had applied their usual "program" of rural colonization, transforming wha,t in the Sabine era, was, mostly, a forest-pastoral area, into a fertile and exceptionally productive land, for the supply of oil, wheat, wine and other and various commodities.
This colonization, still today, leaves visible traces on the territory, with the remains of villas, cisterns, arcades, villages, etc .: a galaxy of small sites which, if read together, can make us imagine that ancient landscape. In the Middle Ages, the processes of feuding the lands and building fortifications, has contributed to the construction of the hill top villages landscape: even here in the Agro Foronovano the "castle" became the fundamental agricultural landscape's organizational unit and was placed in the most strategic locations for the control of the territory, as in the case of Rocchette and Rocchettine, two "sentinel" settlements, located at a very short distance from each other, controlling a rocky bottleneck in the Imella River Valley where an important connecting road between the Sabina and the Reatino rivers used to pass. These two fortified villages really seem to come from some chivalrous novel, raised as bulwarks on two rocky spurs, opposite one another, to dominate the limestone cliff below which, recessed, the river Imella (or Aia) flows and surrounded by a dark and impenetrable cloak of woods. It seems incredible that such inaccessible places, now in part abandoned, used once to be important settlement centers and objects of disputes and wars. This has happened until Mid-twentieth century, up to the time when we were still dependent on the natural resources that the territory could offer us. Those resources, from springs to flora species, either grown or harvested; from animals to forests and stones; from the sun to the climate; and from the soils fertility to the land morphology; are still there, in part, witnessing how we used to be. The wonderful and exciting views from the heights, instead, allow us to visualize the past and present of this land in a single panoramic view ..... From a bird's eye view.
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