Editing Rubicon (section)

==Identification==
With the revival during the fifteenth century of interest in the topography of ancient Roman Italy, the matter of identifying the Rubicon in the contemporary landscape became a topic of debate among [[Renaissance humanist]]s.<ref>A brief account of the controversies favoring rivers of Romagna, between the Pisciatello, called the Rigone in its lowest reaches, the Fiumicino near Savignano and the Uso is in ''Dissertazione seconda dell'abate Pasquale Amati savignanese sopra alcune lettere del signor dottor Bianchi di Rimini e sopra il Rubicone degli antichi'' (Faenza, 1763:6–8), noted in Roberto Weiss, ''The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity'', 1969:111f and note 9.</ref> To support the claim of the river Pisciatello, a spurious inscription forbidding the passage of an army in the name of the Roman people and Senate, the so-called ''Sanctio'', was placed by a bridge on that river. The [[Quattrocento]] humanist [[Flavio Biondo]] was deceived by it;<ref>Biondo, ''Italia illustrata''.</ref> the actual inscription is conserved in the Museo Archeologico, Cesena.<ref>Weiss 1969:112 and notes</ref> As the centuries went by, several rivers of the Adriatic coast between Ravenna and Rimini have at times been said to correspond to the ancient Rubicon.

The ''[[Via Aemilia]]'' (modern SS&nbsp;9) still follows its original Roman course as it runs between the hills and the plain; it would have been the obvious course to follow as it was the only major Roman road east of the [[Apennine Mountains]] leading to and from the [[Po Valley]]. Attempts to deduce the original course of the Rubicon can be made only by studying written documents and other archaeological evidence such as Roman milestones, which indicate the distance between the ancient river and the nearest Roman towns.
[[File:Tabula_Peutingeriana_Rubicon.png|left|thumb|Detail of the {{Lang|la|[[Tabula Peutingeriana]]}} around the Rubicon]]
The [[mile zero]] of a [[Roman road]], from which distances were counted, was always the crossing between the [[Cardo]] and the [[Decumanus Maximus|Decumanus]], the two principal streets in every Roman town, running north–south and east–west respectively. In a section of the [[Tabula Peutingeriana]], a medieval copy of a Late Antique document showing the network of Roman roads, a river in northeastern Italy labeled "''fl. Rubicum''" is shown at a position 12 [[Mile#Roman mile|Roman miles]] ({{cvt|18|km|disp=comma}}) north of Rimini along the coastline; this is the distance between Rimini and a place called "Ad Confluentes," drawn west of the Rubicon, on the Via Aemilia. However, the river-bed shape observed in Pisciatello and the Rubicon river in the present day, well below Roman-age soil layers, is likely to indicate that any possible course modification of rivers could have occurred only very close to the coastline, and therefore only slight.

Furthermore, the features of the present-day Rubicon river (north–south course, orthogonal to the Via Aemilia) and the Via Aemilia itself (a straight reach before and after the crossing, and a turn just passing by {{ill|San Giovanni in Compito|it|Chiesa di San Giovanni in Compito}}, so marking a possible administrative boundary) are common to typical geographical oriented limits of Roman age, being what made this a clue of actual identification of the present-day Rubicon River with the Fiumicino.<ref>Gianluca Bottazzi (Università di Parma), ''Le centuriazioni di Ariminum: prospettive di ricerca.''</ref>

In 1933, after various efforts that spanned centuries, the Fiumicino, which crossed the town of Savignano di Romagna (now [[Savignano sul Rubicone]]), was officially identified as the former Rubicon. Strong evidence supporting this theory came in 1991,<ref>Pignotti R., Ravagli P., Donati G., "Rubico quondam finis Italiae", ''Città del Rubicone'', p. 3, October, 1991</ref> when three Italian scholars (Pignotti, Ravagli, and Donati), after a comparison between the [[Tabula Peutingeriana]] and other ancient sources (including [[Cicero]]), showed that the distance from Rome to the Rubicon River was 200 Roman miles. Key elements of their work are:
* The locality of San Giovanni in Compito (now a western quarter of Savignano) has to be identified with the old ''Ad Confluentes'' (''compitum'' means "road junction", and is synonymous with ''confluentes'').
* The distance between ''Ad Confluentes'' and Rome, according to the [[Tabula Peutingeriana]], is 201 Roman miles.
* The distance from today's San Giovanni in Compito and the Fiumicino river is one Roman mile ({{cvt|1.48|km|disp=comma}}).