Cutilia, il santuario federale dei Sabini | Filippo Coarelli

What do we really know about the most ancient Sabina? Very little: few sources, a few fragments, many hypotheses yet to be verified. But from these traces, a crucial place emerges: Cutilia, near Lake Paterno, a possible sacred and political center of the Sabines. In his lecture at the Festival of the Italic Peoples, Filippo Coarelli reconstructs the role of Cutilia through Cato, Varro, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Pliny, Horace, Seneca, Macrobius, and Suetonius, following the thread of the cult of Vacuna, a Sabine deity identified at times with Victory, Minerva, Diana, and other female figures of the ancient world. At the heart of the analysis is the hypothesis that the so-called "Baths of Cutilia" were not simply a thermal complex, but a large federal sanctuary: the place where a pastoral society, organized into villages and linked to the Via Salaria, would have recognized its common center. From Cutilia, the view then extends to Rome: the Capitoline Hill, the cult of Saturn, the Claudii, the Flavians, and the Sabine memory of Vespasian. A lesson on the origins of the Sabines, but also on historical method: when sources are insufficient, landscape and archaeology become indispensable.