Feronia (Etruria)
[3] It was partially excavated when the A1 Rome-Milan motorway which crosses it was built, and the archaeological site is adjacent to that of the ancient Roman Villa dei Volusii.
[5] It was located at an obvious communications centre between the Latin, Cures Sabine, Etruscan and Faliscan territories, near the Tiber[6] and Via Tiberina and at the start of the routes to the Picena and Teramo-Aquilana regions, the future via Salaria and via Caecilia.
Feronia appears to have been a Sabine goddess,[10] and hence the festivals at her shrine seem to have been attended especially by the Sabines, though the sanctuary itself was in the Etruscan territory, and dependent upon the neighbouring city of Capena [11] The first mention of these annual festivals occurs as early as the reign of Tullus Hostilius, when we find them already frequented by great numbers of people, not only for religious objects, but as a kind of fair for the purposes of trade, a custom which seems to have prevailed at all similar meetings.
[12] Great wealth had, in the course of ages, been accumulated at the shrine of Feronia, and this tempted Hannibal to make a digression from his march during his retreat from Rome, in 211 BC, for the purpose of plundering the temple.
But it is singular that Ptolemy, who also notices a Lucus Feroniae, to which he gives the title of a colonia, places it in the northwest extremity of Etruria, between the Arnus (modern Arno) and the Macra.
[17] No other notice occurs of any such place in this part of Etruria; and the Liber Coloniarum, though unusually copious in its description of the province of Tuscia, mentions no such colony at all.
Archaeology has shown that the Colonia Julia Felix Lucus Feroniae was founded for army veterans at this time starting with the forum area built over the earlier town and with an orthogonal city plan.
They include a beautiful domus of the 2nd c. AD with a series of emblematic polychrome mosaics and had been preceded by republican phases with opus signinum floors.
The orientation of the urban layout indicate its clear connection with the sacred area surrounding the Temple of Feronia adjacent to the forum, which had one of the main entrances at this point, preserved almost unchanged in the radical restructuring that the site underwent at the time of the establishment of the Roman colony.
There was also a theatre and a Temple to Hercules mentioned on an inscription but yet to be found, a schola or large hall with a beautiful opus sectile floor (1st century AD) and the Villa dei Volusii.
long rectangular Roman Forum was bordered on the north end by a sacred terrace with a basilica for law-courts and traders, and behind that the temple of Salus Frugifera, a sacellum of the Augustales and the late-Tiberian Augusteum which formed a monumental backdrop.
On the eastern side is the enclosure wall of the sanctuary of Feronia on top of which were channels and lead pipes from the Aqua Augusta aqueduct in the Augustan era, mentioned in inscriptions.
