4 The Terracing Wall

You have been seeing finds referring to "Roman" Perugia so far. Now however we will go one more century back in time, and reach the second century B.C. That was the epoch in which major changes in the city planning with regard to the town's core took place. A majestic terracing was built in the area that currently corresponds to Piazza IV Novembre (the main square): its size was about 328 x 230 feet (100 x 70 meters), meaning a surface of some 7,000 square meters.

So the acropolis hill started to look like a "stone box" in downtown, a huge terracing supported by powerful walls – like the one you can still admire in front of you, which was the north end. The whole wall was built by using travertine blocks perfectly squared, each block having been dressed and reworked by hand. We can infer that the wall did not only have a static function (to contain part of the hill where the acropolis rose), but also an "ideological" function precisely because, as an external frame, it should show the power and monumental greatness of Perugia.

This structure, as well as the city walls, was completely made in drystone! See, there is no mortar between the blocks. The wall was built in the second century B.C. by employing a special engineering technique: each horizontal row of travertine blocks was placed some 2 centimeters (one inch, more or less) backward in comparison with the row below. This way a wall is created that is not perpendicular to the soil, but slightly sloping, and therefore better with reference to statics.

As we already noted in the Roman street, the environment changed a lot during the centuries. In the Middle Ages the look of the sacred hill would again be radically transformed: the function of the terracing wall was no longer that of simply containing, it worked as a supporting base for the great brick vault you can see over your heads. Once again, old structures provided the foundations to new buildings rising upon them. This place was no more in the open air; the need for new buildings had turned part of the town into an interior. The building then put up here corresponds to a section of the current Canons' house, and especially the north side of the two cloisters. The vast room you are inside was reused as a cellar to store food and wine. Hence the name of the street behind you, Via delle Cantine, that is Cellars Street.

On many of the wall blocks, two letters in the Etruscan alphabet can be made out. They are the "quarry marks." Carved during the preparatory process in the quarry, they aimed to both indicate the place of origin and send the materials to the "yard" where they would be further worked. In fact, because of the great quantity of materials, and the efforts needed to transport them, it was fundamental that the blocks reached their actual destination.