City
Interocrio
Antrodoco
Listen to the story
Interocrio, today Antrodoco in central Italy, carries its landscape in its name. The Roman grammarian Festus records an old word, ocris, for a rugged mountain, so the name describes a place between crags, and the town, hemmed in by mountains, still lives up to it. It was a station on the Via Salaria, where a road branched off to Amiternum. The Greek geographer Strabo calls it a mere Sabine village, yet the map gives it a pair of towers drawn just like those of Narni. Around AD 110 the emperor Trajan had a retaining wall built here against a slipping mountainside.