Centuripe (EN). Nuovi dati sull'edificio romano di contrada "Vagni"

Ancient Centuripae is a town lying on the ancient road a Thermis Catina, between Enna and Catania. During the middle imperial period, several public and private concrete buildings enriched it. One of these, I Vagni, a structure around 40 m. long and 8 m. high, lies not far from the town on the hillside of a deep erosive valley. The construction is throughout of brick-faced concrete and consists of a row of five apses and of a straight wall (belonging to two depicted rooms). In the opposite hillside, where a spring flows, there are the remains of a cistern and of an aqueduct (?) related to the building. There are two interpretation theories about the original purpose of the monument: 1)Remains of a bath- building, most of which has vanished; 2) A well-preserved nymphaeum (most scholars). Some excavation trenches, dug during recent restoration works, offered new data, which are a first step towards understanding of this enigmatic complex. There is evidence to prove that the first two apses to the southeast belong to originally enclosed rooms. In the second of these, there is an apsidal plunge bath related to a drain running through the arched lateral walls of the other three apses. The presence of a plunge in a closed room offers, beyond doubt, a radical contribution to the baths interpretation. Fragments of quadrangular tiles (tubuli), found in the filling of the robbed foundation trench of the plunge parapet (pluteus), lead to the same interpretation, too. There is also new evidence for the building's history. In the medieval period, the monument must have been heavily robbed and damaged. During the 13th century, inhabitants of Centuripe, destroyed in 1233 by Frederick II, took shelter in it. Later, the building was heavily damaged (by an earthquake?) and definitively abandoned.