Fordongianus

The name comes from Forum Traiani, but it deceives: the city was not founded by Trajan. That forum says rather what this place was, namely a meeting and peaceful trading point between the romanised peoples of the plain and those of the interior, the Barbaria, who had not submitted to Rome; and it was those very peoples who, in the first century, dedicated here an inscription to an emperor, probably Tiberius. The reason for the place, though, is the water: a natural spring that still today comes out at fifty-six degrees all year round. Over it they built the baths, with a great pool originally roofed, the calidarium, the tepidarium and the frigidarium; on the edges of the pools nymphs are incised, the floor was mosaic and the ceiling above the water was made of blue glass paste, to imitate the reflection.

That the baths were a place of healing is said also by two statues of the god Bes, tied to health cults, and by a small sacred space dedicated to the nymphs, found recently. In the fifth century Fordongianus was a bishop's seat; the diocese was later suppressed and joined to that of Santa Giusta. Near the village are the amphitheatre and the church of San Lussorio, built in the eleventh century over a late-antique necropolis. The other material of this place is stone: the quarries give trachyte, red, pink, green and grey, of which the houses here and in half the Barigadu are made, and the stonecutters still work it. Of red trachyte, too, are the columns of the loggia and the windows of the Casa Aragonese, of the late sixteenth century, carved with floral and religious motifs; some have the ogee arch, of Arab origin. The house was lived in until 1978 and today is partly a museum.