Torba (Va). Scavi 2013-2019

Technical Information

The volume publishes the results of the excavation conducted between 2013 and 2019 at the Torba site, the southern end of the important late antique fortification of Castel Seprio (Va), later a Benedictine monastery. During these years various sectors of the site have been discovered and investigated, the first asset of the FAI - Fondo Ambiente Italiano, including a funerary annex north of the church of Santa Maria, a large building straddling the walls, the internal and external area imposing tower and an environment located under the monastery. Considerable resources have been invested for the dating of the walls of the defense system - towers and walls - of which the contemporaneity or otherwise with respect to the top defenses of the castrum and the older buildings of the monastery has been discussed for some time. The excavations have undoubtedly increased our knowledge of Peat: from the stratification processes, quantitatively impressive not only for the usual activities of a settlement - construction, domestic and artisanal - but above all for natural events, a consequence of its position at the foot of a slope geologically unstable. Of the defensive walls, preserved in elevation up to the battlements as a spine wall of the monastic building leaning against the tower, the construction site levels, the constructive characteristics and the subsequent evolution have been identified. For the Lombard period, new information concerns: the layers of washout, produced by intense natural phenomena, interspersed with sporadic attendance, which gradually filled the ground floor of the tower with debris; various elements of the Lombard belt found in these layers; a hut leaning against the walls that has returned a belt tang from that period and, finally, a new proposal for the sequence of the church of Santa Maria with a first phase prior to the mid-XNUMXth century. The excavation has returned a fair amount of finds, both artifacts and eco-facts, from which further information on nutrition, the environment, and the physical characteristics of the buried, has been obtained, thanks to the involvement of numerous specialists who have applied the most innovative analytical methodologies . All this was possible with the financial support of the University of Padua and the Lombardy Region.