Archive · Chronicle · Memory Anteprima Turin, Italia
TORINOMIA
en

Augusta Taurinorum

The Roman colony founded under Augustus between 25 and 15 BC at the confluence of the Dora and the Po, from which Turin and its grid-pattern layout were born.

Image from the Il Torinese publication
From the Il Torinese publication, 2026-09-25

Augusta Taurinorum (in full Iulia Augusta Taurinorum) is the Roman colony from which Turin was born. Founded in the Augustan age near the confluence of the Dora Riparia with the Po, in the territory of the Taurini people, it left the city its most lasting form: the grid of orthogonal streets that still shapes the historic centre today, two monumental gates and the layout of the main streets.[1]

Before the colony: the Taurini and Hannibal

Ancient sources recall Taurasia as the probable chief town of the Taurini, a name that designated more a group of tribes than a single ethnicity; where exactly it stood is not known. In 218 BC the Taurini opposed Hannibal's descent into Italy: according to Polybius the Carthaginian commander defeated them without great effort and destroyed their centre after just three days of siege, an episode that local memory would later magnify.[1] In 49 BC Roman citizenship was extended to the Transpadani, the Taurini included.[2]

Foundation and layout

The colony was founded under Augustus, most probably between 25 and 15 BC, in the years when Rome was completing its control of the Alps: the site on the Po served as a well-equipped base for armies heading for the mountain passes.[1][2] The double name Iulia Augusta leaves open the question of whether there were two foundations, one Caesarian and one Augustan, or a single one.[3] The city became part of regio XI Transpadana and soon gained importance thanks to its central position in the sub-Alpine region.[4]

The layout was the regular, quadrangular one typical of new Roman towns, with its perimeter along today's via della Consolata, via Santa Chiara, piazza Castello and via Santa Teresa.[2] The measurements vary among scholars: the Enciclopedia Italiana gives a rectangle of about 770 by 710 metres with a perimeter wall of about 2,960 metres, equal to 10,000 Roman feet;[3] the Enciclopedia dell'Arte Antica speaks of about 800 by 700 metres;[5] the MuseoTorino entry gives 700 by 750 metres, for about 50 hectares, the extent of a centuria.[1] The walls had a rubble core, an inner facing of split river pebbles alternating with courses of brick and an outer brick skin, punctuated by square towers.[5]

The main east-west street, the decumanus maximus, had a roadway about 10.5 metres wide paved with large polygonal flagstones, with sidewalks about one metre twenty wide on each side; sewers ran beneath the paving.[6] Its route is followed by via Garibaldi, which runs from the ancient western gate towards piazza Statuto.[7] The rest of the grid survives in the Quadrilatero Romano.

The gates

On the four sides opened four gates: the Palatina to the north, the Marmorea to the south, the Pretoria to the east and the Segusina to the west, so called because from there the road to Segusio began.[3] The latter stood at the crossing of via Garibaldi and via della Consolata and led onto the route of the Val di Susa towards Susa and the passes into Gaul; it was torn down in the eighteenth century, when the city expanded westward.[7]

Two gates have survived to this day. The Porta Palatina, in Roman times the porta principalis sinistra, is a double gate with a courtyard facing inward and two corner towers over thirty metres tall; in the Middle Ages it became a fortified palace and in the eighteenth century a prison.[8] The eastern gate, on the other hand, is hidden inside Palazzo Madama: two sixteen-sided towers framed four archways, the two central ones for carts and the side ones for pedestrians. Excavations by Alfredo d'Andrade brought its foundations and some marble reliefs with military scenes back to light.[9]

Public buildings and life in the colony

Augusta Taurinorum was a fully-fledged city, with a theatre, paved streets, an aqueduct, sewers, temples and public buildings.[2] The theatre, built against the walls, occupied almost an entire insula; in a second phase the cavea was enlarged beyond its original limits and the stage podium faced with slabs of white marble.[5] Later the building was transformed into a more complex structure, with a portico behind the stage.[1] The forum most likely stood near today's town hall, the amphitheatre outside the walls, in the area of piazza San Carlo.[3]

North of the wall, between piazza Emanuele Filiberto, piazza della Repubblica and corso Regina Margherita, Giulio Cordero di San Quintino had already reported a large marble floor and fragments of statues in 1830-1831; in the 1990s works for an underground car park investigated about 5,000 square metres of a long public building, perhaps a bath complex. A stretch of its southern wall is preserved in the car park of piazza Emanuele Filiberto, near Porta Palazzo.[10]

The community was governed by two supreme magistrates, the duoviri, flanked by aediles and quaestors and by a council, the ordo decurionum. A funerary inscription commemorates Publius Livius Macer, elected duovir five times; from the 2nd century on the curatores rei publicae appear, a sign of reduced autonomy.[11] The inhabitants never numbered more than a few thousand and, according to MuseoTorino, were largely of local origin, with frequent unions between immigrants and Romanized natives.[1][2] The colony administered a territory that reached the Orco and the western Alpine valleys, bordering that of Eporedia.[11]

The fire of 69

During the civil war of 69 AD, the troops of Vitellius passed through Turin.[1] Tacitus recounts in the Historiae that a quarrel between a Batavian soldier, a local craftsman and a legionary of the 14th legion nearly turned into a battle between the units, until two praetorian cohorts sided with the legionaries and the Batavians backed down; as the legion departed, fires left burning set part of the city ablaze.[12] The historian records it thus:

«nocte, qua proficiscebatur legio, relictis passim ignibus pars Taurinae coloniae ambusta»

Tacitus, Historiae, II, 66

In the Latin text of the Historiae the sentence says, in essence, that at night, as the legion departed, fires left here and there burned part of the colony of the Taurini.[13]

Late Antiquity and the end of the Roman city

As the Empire declined the city housed a unit, the numerus Dalmatarum Divitensium, and in 312, near Turin, Constantine defeated the supporters of Maxentius.[3] Between 371 and 397 Turin became the seat of an autonomous diocese with its first bishop, Massimo, and in 398 a synod called for by Ambrose was held there; the Enciclopedia Italiana, however, places Massimo around 415.[1][3] The episcopal complex united three churches, dedicated to the Saviour, to Saint John and to Mary: the archaeologists Luisella Pejrani Baricco and Sergio Roda describe it as «an exceptional complex of three twin basilicas, adjacent and aligned, which has no parallel in the Christian West».[1] From it descends the future Archdiocese of Turin.

The Lombard conquest, which reached Turin around 569-570, marked the definitive collapse of the Roman civic organization.[1][4] The name of the Porta Palatina, according to one hypothesis, would derive precisely from the palace of the Lombard kings that arose nearby.[8]

What remains

Besides the Porta Palatina, today at the centre of a small archaeological park in piazza Cesare Augusto, and the gate incorporated into Palazzo Madama, where stretches of Roman wall can still be seen along the visitor route,[9][8] the remains of the theatre and fragments of walls and foundations survive in the cellars of private buildings on via Garibaldi, not open to visitors.[5][7] Palazzo Madama also preserves the crowning of a funerary stele with the Roman she-wolf.[9] The most visible legacy, however, remains the street plan: anyone walking the grid of streets between via Garibaldi and the Consolata is still walking the lines laid out by Augustus's surveyors.

Pages linking here

Related articles: Città metropolitana di Torino, Palazzo Madama, Porta Palatina, Quadrilatero Romano, Royal Library of Turin, Torino

Sources

  1. MuseoTorino
  2. MuseoTorino
  3. Treccani – Enciclopedia Italiana
  4. Treccani
  5. Treccani – Enciclopedia dell'Arte Antica
  6. Mole24 — 1 September 2026
  7. Mole24 — 24 August 2026
  8. Italia.it
  9. Palazzo Madama – Museo Civico d'Arte Antica
  10. Mole24 — 7 September 2026
  11. Mole24 — 2 September 2026
  12. Mole24 — 6 September 2026
  13. The Latin Library

Report a mistake.