The village of Otricoli, the first town in Umbria that you encounter traveling from Rome to the North along the Tiber Valley and the Flaminia State Road, is a beautiful stone village, inhabited since the Archaic age by the Sabine populations, after the Roman conquest the population here was among conquerors’s best allies In the landscape.
Rivers in the world have always attracted humans and animals, river is a mother, donor of soil fertility, it is an imperious father when it disrupts and shapes the landscape at will, creating valleys, plains, swamps. Since the dawn of civilization large rivers, like the Tiber, were the only ways for rapid transport of goods and people. Near rivers cities used to be built – like Ocriculum. The name of the city is actually derived from the Umbrian word "Okris" which means heights, it seems a contradiction, but in fact the Umbrian-sabine settlement began where today the village of Otricoli is located, on the river there was only a port. But with the arrival of the Romans the settlement on the river had a gradual growth that culminated in the Augustan era ... Today the evocative ruins of Ocriculum remind us of the absolute hegemony of ancient Rome on river trades. The richest agriculture the first industries: mills, factories, hydroelectric power stations, etc. used to be developed along the rivers as well. We will relive the role the “blond” river has had for the Sabinian, the Roman, middle age people and so on and we ‘ll discover the signs of the relationship between man and the river, reflecting on what is now the river for humans and for the other inhabitants of its delicate ecosystem.
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