Road station
Ad Taberna Frigida
S. Leonardo in Frigido
Listen to the story
Ad Taberna Frigida, the tavern on the Frigidus, a river whose name simply means cold, was a mansio, an overnight stop on the Via Aemilia Scauri between Pisa and Luni in Italy; the church of San Leonardo in Frigido still carries the river's name. The map marks it with a small rectangular building of the kind it uses for inns and lodgings, apparently left unfinished, with walls only partly battlemented. Scholars nearly dismissed that as the copyist's fantasy, until the same half-battlemented wall turned up on a Roman mosaic in Oderzo, enclosing a courtyard where a woman scatters feed for her poultry. The river itself is not drawn.