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This piece of flat land has an area about six hundred yards square, the natural boundaries of which are: on the west, the deep bed of the watercourse spanned by the Ponte dei Sardoni; on the east, the cut over which is built the Ponte dell' Ospedalato, and on the south, the depression running parallel to the Via degli Arconi, and containing the modern road from S. Rocco to Cave.
Another important road was outside the city wall, from one gate to the other, and took the slope on the south side of the city where the Via degli Arconi now runs. As far as excavations have proved up to this time, the oldest road out of Praeneste is that which is now the Via della Marcigliana, along which were found the very early tombs.
The natural limits of the ancient city proper can hardly be mistaken. The city included not only the arx and that portion of the southern slope of the mountain which was walled in, but also a level piece of fertile ground below the city, across the present Via degli Arconi.
The continuation of the cyclopean wall can be seen now as far as the Porta del Sole, and the line of the wall which turns to the west is positively known from the cippi of the ancient pomerium, which were found in 1824 along the present Via degli Arconi.
Before the time of Sulla there had been a gate in the south wall of the city, approached by one road, which ascended from the east on the arches facing the present Via degli Arconi.
There is another large brick reservoir below the present ground level in the angle between the Via degli Arconi and the Cave road below the Porta del Sole, but it is too low ever to have served for public use. It was in connection with some private bath. The fourth huge reservoir, the one on Colle S. Martino, has already been mentioned.
The reservoir above this in the Barberini gardens is of a date a half century later. It is of the same brick work as the great fountain which stands, now debased to a grist mill, across the Via degli Arconi about half way between S. Lucia and Porta del Sole. The upper reservoir undoubtedly supplied this fountain, and other public buildings in the forum below.
It runs nearly parallel with the Via degli Arconi, and takes a direction which would strike the Via Praenestina where it crosses the Via Praenestina Nuova which runs past Zagarolo. That is, the most ancient piece of road we have leads up to the southeast corner of the town, but the oldest tombs point to a road the direction of which was toward the southwest corner.
In 1756 ancient paving stones were still in situ above the row of arches on the Via degli Arconi, and even yet the ascent is plain enough to the eye. The ground slopes up rather moderately along the Via degli Arconi toward the east, and nearly below the southeast corner of the ancient wall turned up to the west on these arches, approaching the entrance in the middle of the south wall of the city.
We know also from an inscription that there was a gladiatorial school at Praeneste. BALNEAE, C.I.L., XIV, 3013, 3014 add. The so-called nymphaeum, the brick building below the Via degli Arconi, mentioned page 41, seems to have been a bath as well as a fountain, because of the architectural fragments found there when it was turned into a mill by the Bonanni brothers.
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