Luni was a city founded by the Romans at the mouth of the Magra River in 177 B.C. as a military outpost in the 20-year war that pitted them against the Ligurian Apuani people for dominance over those territories and had a life spanning more than a millennium.
The city was originally called Luna and probably owes its name to a primitive Italic goddess linked to the cult of Artemis, although the toponym portus Lunae was already known before the foundation of the city, which probably took place on an Etruscan settlement, and so it may be thought that the name actually derives from the shape of the inlet on which it arose, reminiscent precisely, of a crescent moon; following the defeat of the Apuan Ligurians it became famous precisely because of its port, maritime and river, from which, especially in imperial times, ships loaded with marble from the Apuan Alps, timber from the Apennine forests, and local products such as cheeses and wines also cited as excellent by Martial and Pliny departed.
The city grew steadily and decisively, especially in the Augustan age, reaching a population of 50,000 and becoming, thanks to its location on the Via Aurelia, but especially to the Apuan marble trade, a rich and monumental center of refined culture and art, and in 275 A.D., in a now Christianized empire, a citizen of Lunigiana, Eutichiano, came to be elected pope.
In the 4th century a major earthquake destroyed many of the city’s buildings, which therefore began to depopulate, and yet, as a testament to its continuing importance, in the 5th century it was elected an episcopal see even though it began its slow decline from that time.
In the 6th century Luni was sacked by the Goths and many citizens abandoned it for good, then in 552 it was conquered by the Byzantines and revived its ancient splendor until it was occupied by Rotari’s Lombards in 642, who destroyed its walls, devastating it, and this dealt a decisive blow to the development of the city also because of the struggle the occupants engaged in with the bishops for administrative control of the area.
In 773, during the Italian campaign against the Lombards, Charlemagne conquered the city and made it a capital under the leadership of a bishop-count, but following the invasion of King Hastings’ Danish Norse, the city was virtually destroyed. Tradition has it that King Hastings attacked Luni mistaking it for Rome and, realizing his mistake, later converted to Christianity.
Despite a new period of prosperity under the leadership of the bishop-counts in the 10th century, the unhealthiness of the area, which was marshy and malarial, and the gradual silting up of the harbor, caused the inhabitants to emigrate to Sarzana, and then in 1204 Pope Innocent II moved the diocese there as well, marking the city’s final demise.
Luni was structured on the pattern of the Romancastrum, then crossed orthogonally by the decumanus, consisting of the Via Aurelia, in a position closer to the coast than the current layout, and the cardo, which connected the forum to the port area. On the forum were the facades of public and religious buildings such as, the Civil Basilica and the Capitolium, in the Hellenistic style dating from the early first century AD, the city’s main temple dedicated to the Capitoline triad i.e. Jupiter, Juno and Minerva.
Today Luna is an archaeological and museum site that can be visited throughout the year.The excavations tell a good story of the city’s layout, and various urban remains can be seen, such as the temple of the goddess Luna, some dwellings and stores, the theater and the beautiful amphitheater, which, outside the city, could hold 7,000 spectators.
The archaeological museum within the site contains artifacts unearthed in excavations of the ancient Roman city that continue in alternating stages to this day.
From a historical point of view, the traces of the disputes between the bishop-counts and the local lords, mainly the Malaspina, descendants of the noble Lombard family of the Obertenghi, for political, military and administrative control of the area are clearly visible in the Middle Ages; for this reason in Lunigiana, in a relatively small territory, there are many castles and parish churches.
Speaking of Lunigiana, it happens to hear it referred to as “The Land of a Hundred Castles,” to understand why such a large number of manors in such a small portion of territory one must keep in mind that the Malaspina family, which had settlements throughout Lunigiana, continued to follow Lombard law, which stipulated that all male sons were entitled to their own fief and each local lord to his own fortress.
Many of these fortresses, built mainly between the 11th and 13th centuries as military garrisons, following the final ruin of the power of the bishop-counts were gradually transformed into lordly residences.
Of the one hundred castles in Lunigiana some have disappeared altogether today, others are reduced to ruins, some however very interesting, and about twenty are those that have been kept intact and can be visited today. Among these it is worth mentioning the Castle of Fosdinovo, which, inserted in the medieval village of the same name, apparently housed Dante during his exile and retains all the features of the later renovations between the 11th and 17th centuries; the 15th-century Fortezza della Brunella, which houses on the ground floor the Museum of Natural History of Lunigiana; the Castle of Malgrate, a canonical example of a medieval fortress; and the Castle of Piagnaro, which since 1975 has also housed the Museum of the Stele Statues of Lunigiana.
Another characteristic element of that period are the pievi, from the Latin “plebs,” meaning plebs, vulgar, indicating their poor and popular origin, which were often built by mixing the sacred and the profane according to a religious conception that had not yet managed to completely replace traditional ancient holistic beliefs with the new ones of Christian origin. Pievi are daughters of the social structure that was emerging under the control of the nascent Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, especially in mountainous areas that were poorly accessible and controllable by the central civil authority.
In particular, the spread of parish churches began as early as the 5th century, but only from the 9th century did they begin to have a properly religious significance as an ecclesiastical district into which the dioceses were divided, normally represented by a rural church on which other churches and chapels depended, according to the modern concept of parish