Altinia Gate
While in Italy our home base was Treviso. According to the internet just over three hundred thousand live there now. It is a medium sized town, by the Sile River. The river is the longest spring fed river in Italy. Treviso is on an ancient road that leads straight to Venice, on the Adriatic sea. There are three gates built into the city walls surrounding the place, one of which was adjacent to our hotel. Our guide escorted us through this gate which was built in the 16th century, for a closer look at the outside of the gate. Above gate the Lion of St Mark’s declared the town was under the protection of Venice.
The area was inhabited from ancient times by the Veniti peoples.
I looked at the gate and felt myself shiver. This place is old, the habitation of peoples extending back before the advent of writing… I imagined the Romans arriving at an earlier version of this gate in 49 BC, with their “offer” of law & order. They called it Trevisium then. The Romans being the rationalist-pragmatic-engineers that they were organized the town streets into the grid system that exists today. When Rome “fell” some 500 years later, legend has it that Attila the Hun stopped at this gate and spared the town.
It’s just me I know, – but at that gate I felt as if this is “sacred” ground. I looked towards the ancient road over the Sile River, and noticed the movement of a river rat on the bank. My species is related to this earth, along with every other species. We’ve been here a long time, – we continue to learn how to take care of our habitat, and our fellow species…
