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From the midst of the Atria rises the central cone, formed of cinders, scoriæ, and lava-streams, and fissured along lines radiating from the axis. This cone is very steep, the angle being about 40°-45° from the horizontal, and is formed of loose cindery matter which gives way at every step, and is rather difficult to climb.
A large vessel of this description may be seen in the cortili of S. Cecilia and SS. Apostoli at Rome. It used to be blessed on the vigil or festival of the Epiphany, as it is now in the Greek and even the Roman church. When churches were built without atria, a vessel of blessed water was placed inside the church: in some of the older churches there is even a well. IV, diss. 15.
Some of this lava, ten years old, as we cross its rugged and black surface presents gaping fissures, showing the mass to be red-hot a few feet from the surface, so slow is the process of cooling. These lava-streams some of them reaching to the sea-coast have issued forth from the Atria at successive periods of eruption.
Mantua at any rate, which was protected by its insular position, was a Tuscan city even in the time of the empire, and Atria on the Po also, where numerous discoveries of vases have been made, appears to have retained its Etruscan character; the description of the coasts that goes under the name of Scylax, composed about 418, calls the district of Atria and Spina Tuscan land.
At this time abundant lavas poured down from the base of the cone into the Atria del Cavallo, thence turned into the Fossa della Vetraria in the direction of the Observatory and towards the Crocella, where they accumulated to such an extent as to cover the hillside for a distance of about 300 metres; then turning below the Canteroni, formed a hillock without spreading much farther.
The far-scheming king laid the foundation of his new colonial power especially in the sea to the east of Italy, the more northern waters of which now became, for the first time, subject to a Greek maritime power. About the year 367, Dionysius occupied and colonized the port of Lissus and island of Issa on the Illyrian coast, and the ports of Ancona, Numana, and Atria, on the coast of Italy.
An inspection of the old inner wall of Monte Somma in that portion where it is best preserved, on the north side of the Atria del Cavallo, or Horse Gulch so called for the reason that those who ascended Vesuvius were accustomed to leave their saddle animals there we perceive that the body of the old cone is to a considerable extent interlaced with dikes or fissures which have been filled with molten lava that has cooled in its place.
In course of time this alphabet, manifestly diffusing itself from Atria and Spina, reached southward along the east coast as far as the Abruzzi, northward to the Veneti and subsequently even to the Celts at the foot of, among, and indeed beyond the Alps, so that its last offshoots reached as far as the Tyrol and Styria.
Similar conflicts probably raged in the north around Firmum, Atria, Pinna, in the south around Luceria, Beneventum, Nola, Paestum, before and while the Roman armies gathered on the borders of the insurgent country.
Here too we first encounter great mercantile cities, particularly Caere in southern Etruria and Rome on the Tiber, which, if we may judge from their Italian names as well as from their being situated at some distance from the sea, were like the exactly similar commercial towns at the mouth of the Po, Spina and Atria, and Ariminum further to the south certainly not Greek, but Italian foundations.
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