Orte

Orte has 8,665 inhabitants on a tuff cliff in the Tiber valley, and it has always been a place of passage: today it is a road and rail junction between the north and the south, the east and the west of central Italy. It was so before as well: here the via Amerina, opened by the Romans after the taking of Falerii, reached the river, and here — until the sixteenth century — the Tiber was crossed north of Rome. The bridge, first of wood and then of masonry, has substructures that can still be seen along the river.

The floods carried it away piece by piece: a first time in November 1514, and definitively on 6 October 1530. It was never rebuilt, not least because the plague had already worn the city down. Against the floods the people of Orte invoked Saint Caesarius, and the gate that led to the river still bears his name. The final blow came in 1589, when pope Sixtus V chose to route everything along the Flaminia and built the Ponte Felice there: Orte lost its crossing and began to decline. The railway, in 1865, put it back on the roads of the world.