Castel di Ieri

Castel di Ieri stands on a knoll in the Subequana valley, along the line of the old Tiburtina Valeria road. The village is organised entirely around its tower: a square tower on a pyramidal base, with walls three metres thick and some twenty metres high, from which everything around can be seen. The main street climbs in a spiral from the church of Santa Maria Assunta up to Santa Croce, which stands right below the tower, and the other streets open out like spokes inside the walls; the low houses outside the walls came later, from the end of the eighteen hundreds.

Outside the village there is an Italic sanctuary that was already standing in the fourth century before Christ and was later rebuilt in Roman times. The excavations of spring 2010 brought to light the floor of the cella: a white mosaic with, at its centre, a black and white square drawing a labyrinth, and four symbols at the corners, among them a compass rose. In 1957, along the consular road, a sestertius of Nero turned up bearing on its reverse the temple of Janus with its doors closed: the sign that Rome, at that moment, was not at war.