Tusculum
Description
Tusculum was an ancient Roman city in the Alban Hills, in the Latium region of Italy. Tusculum was most famous in Roman times for the many great and luxurious patrician country villas sited close to the city, yet a comfortable distance from Rome, notably the villas of Cicero and Lucullus.
Tusculum is first mentioned in history as an independent city-state with a king, a constitution and gods of its own. The city walls can be dated between the 5th and 4th century BCE. Tusculum subsequently became an ally of Rome and later it was occupied to Rome in the 5th-4th centuries BCE. In Roman times the city had expanded into two parts: the acropolis with the temples of the Dioscuri and Jupiter Maius, and the main city along the ridge of the hill where the main street passes through the forum to the theatre.
The villas of the neighbourhood, of which 36 owners are recorded in the Republican era and 131 villa sites identified, had indeed acquired greater importance than the town itself, which was not easily accessible. By the end of the Republic, and still more during the imperial period, the territory of Tusculum was a favorite place of residence for wealthy Romans.
From the 5th to the 10th century there are no historical mentions of Tusculum. In the 10th century it was the base of the Counts of Tusculum, an important family in the medieval history of Rome.
Sights
The Roman amphitheatre of Tusculum is located outside the walls, partly resting on the south-east slopes of the hill and partly supported to the north-west by masonry substructures. It has been partially excavated. Its capacity was about 3,000 and it measures 80 x 53 m. The lower part is built in opus quadratum with blocks of peperino, the upper part in opus mixtum with brick lattice. Brick stamps date it to the 2nd century AD.
In the High Middle Ages, there were three churches in Tusculum: St. Saviour and Holy Trinity and St. Thomas on the acropolis. The Greek monastery of St. Agatha lay at the foot of the Tuscolo hill: it was founded in 370 AD by the basilian monk John of Cappadocia, a disciple of St. Basil of Caesarea, called St. Basil the Great. He brought here a relic of the master, handed it over to him by monk Gregory Nazianzus.
The Portrait of 'Madonna del Tuscolo', placed nowadays in a little aedicule on the Tuscolo hill, is a reproduction in ceramic of an earlier original icon from Tusculum, spoil of war, which now is in the Abbey of St. Mary in Grottaferrata.
In the extra-urban area located south of the city, between it and the Via Latina, there is archeological evidence of burials in the place of a medieval church already in ruin after 1191 and dating to the 13th century, found by the last archeological excavation (1999).
The cross of Tusculum there was already in 1840, as reported by Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, rector of the English College. In October, 1864 the students of the English College rebuilt the plinth of foundation of the old cross. Now on the top of the Tuscolo hill is an altar and an iron cross 19 metres high.