Town Acquasanta Terme History Roman era
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ROMAN ERA Acquasanta is indicated in the Tavola Peutingeriana with the name of Ad Aquas. The Tavola Peutingeriana or Tabula Peutingeriana is a copy of the XIII century of an ancient Roman document showing the military roads of the Empire. It is named after the humanist and classicist Konrad Peutinger who had inherited it from his friend Konrad Bickel. Peutinger would have liked to publish the paper, but died before he could do soThe Tavola consists of 11 parchments joined together to form a strip of 680 x 33 cm. It shows 200,000 km of roads, but also the positions of cities, seas, rivers, forests and mountain chains. It is not a map projection, so the format does not allow a realistic representation of either landscapes or distances, but this was not the intention of whoever conceived the idea for it.Acquasanta is marked after Asco (Ascoli Piceno) and before Surpicarum (Arquata del Tronto). Among the roads of interest there is the Salaria, thus named because of the salt trade, but the Romans went to Ad Aquas for its thermal baths from earliest antiquity.The first to cite the Thermal Baths of Acquasanta was Tito Livio Acquasanta when he reprised the words of the Roman Consul Gaius Planco in the year 708 after the founding of Rome. Affected by a serious disease and after having taken many mineral baths in Etruria, it was only here that he recovered his health. Taken by enthusiasm he used to say "the people of Ascoli are blessed and death is unknown to them because they are able to prolong their lives thanks to these prodigious mineral baths".Apart from the salt trade the Salaria was used for the olive trade and “panis picentinum”, made of flour mixed with must, apple puddings and dried figs, almonds, truffles, cooked wine, travertine, laces hand-woven by women and knives.The history of Acquasanta has always been linked to that of Ascoli and it is to be supposed that the men of the mountains also took part in the expedition to Cannes. Bibliography:
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