ABSTRACT
The traveller enters Fara in Sabina through an arch in its medieval city wall. The frame of this arch, along with the upward incline of the narrow cobblestone street, suggests a theatrical set. Fara in Sabina is medieval in the way only an Italian hilltop village can be. Its essence, its invisible structuring principle, is not Roman but Lombard. Amidst the collapse of the Empire, its current form arose from the imaginations and labour of Germanic and Frankish ‘barbarians’ who descended from the north, where far beyond the Alps and even the Rhine they had forged tribes of the forests: worlds beyond the reach of Rome. The Sabine people have been cultivating these hills for millennia, preserving food, transporting salt, growing olives. Their DNA lives on, invisibly, in the first Romans, who mythically raped the Sabine women back from these hills to breed the citizens of the first city: the basis for the kingdom and republic and empire to follow.
