Ravenna, A Study | Page 3

from west to east by a great river, the
Po, and everywhere it is watered and nourished by its two hundred
tributaries.
Shut off as it is on the south from Italy proper by the Apennines, this
plain is defended from Gaul and the Germanics, on the west and the
north, by the mightiest mountains in Europe, the Alps, which here
enclose it in a vast concave rampart that stretches from the
Mediterranean to the Adriatic. On the east it is contained by the sea.
[Illustration: Sketch Map of northern Italy]
The history of this vast country before the Roman Conquest is, as is
history everywhere in the West before that event, vague and obscure.
But this at least may be said: it was first in the occupation of the
Etruscans, who in time were turned out, destroyed, or enslaved by the
Gauls, those invaders who crossed the Alps from the west and who
during nearly two hundred years, continually, though never with an
enduring success, invaded Italy, and in 388 B.C. actually captured the
City. Rome, however, had by the year 223 B.C. succeeded in planting
her fortresses at Placentia and Cremona and in fortifying Mutina
(Modena), when suddenly in 218 B.C. Hannibal unexpectedly
descended into the Cisalpine plain and destroyed all she had achieved.
With his defeat, however, the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul was
undertaken anew, and at some time after 183 B.C.--we do not know
exactly when--the whole of this vast lowland country passed into
Roman administration, to become the chief province of Caesar's great
triple command, and one of the most valuable parts of the empire.
What, then, is the relation of this vast lowland country between the
Alps and the Apennines to Italy proper? It stands as it has always stood
to her as a great defence. For if, as we must, we consider Italy as the
shrine, the sanctuary, and the citadel of Europe, a place apart and
separate--and because of this she has been able to do her work both
secular and religious--what has secured her but Cisalpine Gaul? The
valley of the Po, all this vast plain, appears in history as the cockpit of
Europe, the battlefield of the Celt, the Phoenician, the Latin, and the
Teuton, of Catholic and Arian, strewn with victories, littered with
defeats, the theatre of those great wars which have built up Europe and
the modern world. If the Gauls had not been broken by the plain, they

would perhaps have overwhelmed Italy and Rome; if Hannibal had
found there enemies instead of friends, the Oriental would not so nearly
have overthrown Europe. It broke the Gothic invasion, Attila never
crossed it, it absorbed the worst of the appalling Lombard flood; Italy
remains to us because of it.
Now since Cisalpine Gaul thus secured Italy, the entry from the one to
the other, the road between them must always have been of an immense
importance. That entry and that road, whenever they were in dispute,
Ravenna commanded, and a good half of her importance lies in this.
I say whenever they were in dispute: in time of peace that road and that
entry were not in the keeping of Ravenna but of Rimini.
A study of the map will show us that though the Apennines shut off
Italy proper from Cisalpine Gaul along a line roughly from Genoa to
Rimini, actually that difficult and barren range just fails to reach the
Adriatic as it curves southward to divide the peninsula in its entire
length into two not unequal parts. This failure of the mountains quite to
reach the sea leaves at this corner a narrow strip of lowland, of marshy
plain in fact, between them. Therefore the Romans, though they were
compelled to cross the Apennines, for Rome lay upon their western
side, were able to do so where they chose and not of necessity to make
the difficult passage at a crucial point.
[Illustration: Sketch Map of Ravenna region]
The road they planned and laid out, the Flaminian Way, the great north
road of the Romans, was built by Caius Flaminius the Censor about
220 B.C.[1], that is to say, immediately after the first subjection of the
Gauls south of the Po which had been largely his achievement, and for
military and political business which that achievement entailed. This
road ran from Rome directly to Ariminum (Rimini) and it crossed the
Apennines near the modern Scheggia and by the great pass of the
Furlo.[2]
[Footnote 1: It is, of course, certain that a road was in existence long
before; but not as a constructed, permanent, and military Way.]
[Footnote 2: The Furlo was to be held in the time of Aurelius Victor, if
not of Vespasian, by the fortress of Petra Pertusa.]
The first act of the