Aufidena

AUFIDENA, an ancient city of the Samnites Caraceni, the site of which is just north of the modern Alfedena,1 Italy, a station on the railway between Sulmona and Isernia, 37 m. from the latter. Its remains are fully and accurately described by L. Mariani in Monumenti dei Lincei (1901), 225 seq.: cf. Notizie degli scavi, 1001, 442 seq.; 1902, 516 seq. The ancient city occupied two hills, both over 3800 ft. above sea-level (in the valley between were found the supposed remains of the later forum), and the walls, of rough Cyclopean work, were over a mile in 1 Two churches here contain paintings of interest in the history of Abruzzese art, and one of them, the Madonna del Campo, contained fragments of a temple of considerable size. length. A fortified outpost lay on a still higher hill to the north. Not very much is as yet known of the city itself (though one public building of the $th century B.C. was excavated in 1901, and a small sanctuary in 1902), attention having been chiefly devoted to the necropolis which lay below it; 1400 tombs had already been examined in 1908, though this number is conjectured to be only a sixteenth of the whole.

They are all inhumation burials, of the advanced iron age, and date from the 7th to the 4th century B.C., falling into three classes — those without coffin, those with a coffin formed of stone slabs, and those with a coffin formed of tiles. The objects discovered are preserved in a museum on the spot. In the Roman period we find Aufidena figuring as a post station on the road between Sulmo and Aesernia, which, however, runs past Castel di Sangro, crossing the river by an ancient bridge some 5 m. to the northeast. Castel di Sangro has remains of ancient walls, but these are attributed to a road by Mariani, and in any case the fortified area there was quite small, only one-sixteenth the size of Aufidena. The attempted identification of Castel di Sangro with Aufidena must therefore be rejected, though we must allow that it was probably the Roman post station; the ancient city, since its capture by the Romans in the 3rd century B.C., having lost something of its importance. (T. As.)