RIETI a city of Italy, in the province of Perugia, 18∣ miles south-east of Terni, which is 69 miles by rail from Rome. It occupies a fine position 1396 feet above the sea on the right bank of the Velino (a torrent sub-tributary to the Tiber), which at this point issues from the limestone plateau; the old town occupies the declivity and the new town spreads out on the level. "While with its quaint red-roofed houses, its old town walls (restored about 1250), its castle, its cathedral (13th and 15th centuries), its episcopal palace (1283, Andrea Pisano), and its various churches and convents Rieti has no small amount of mediaeval pictur-esqueness, it also displays a good deal of modern activity in wine-growing, cattle-breeding, and sugar-boiling. The fertility of the neighbourhood is celebrated both by Virgil and by Cicero. A Roman bridge over the Velino, Thorwaldsen’s monument to Isabella Alfani, and a statue of St Barbara by Berdini, both in the cathedral, and the Palazzo Vincentini by Vignola deserve to be mentioned. The population was 7875 in 1871, and 9618 (with suburbs, 13,679; in the commune, 16,822) in 1881....
According to Terentius Varro (himself perhaps of Reatino birth) and others who have followed him, the people who founded Cures, and afterwards settled on the Palatine at Rome, were natives of the Reatine territory; but this is of somewhat the same questionable character as the other story about the companion of Hercules who was buried at this point near the Via Salaria. About the Via Salaria itself, there is no doubt it led from the sea to Reate and onwards towards Ancona, and was from a very early date the great route for the conveyance of salt to the Sabine country. While hardly mentioned in connexion with the Punic or Civil Wars, Reate is described by Strabo as exhausted by those long contests. Its inhabitants received the Roman franchise at the same time with the rest of the Sabines (290 b.c.), but it appears as a praefectura and not as a municipium down to the beginning of the empire. It was never made a colonia, though veterans of the Praetorian and of the legions Octava and Décima Augusta were settled there by Vespasian, who belonged to a Reatine family and was born in the neighbourhood. For the contests of the Reatines with the people of Interamna see Terni. About the middle of the 12th century the town was besieged and captured by Roger I. of Sicily. In the struggle between church and empire it always held with the former; and it defied the forces of Frederick II. and Otho IV. Pope Nicholas IV. long resided at Rcati, and it was there he crowned Charles II. of Anjou king of the Two Sicilies. In the 14th century Robert, and afterwards Joanna, of Naples managed to keep possession of Reati for many years, but it returned to the States of the Church under Gregory IX. About the year 1500 tho liberties of the town, long defended against the encroachments of the popes, were entirely abolished. An earthquake in 1785 was in 1799 followed by the much more disastrous pillage of Reati by the papal troops for a space of fourteen days.
See Aldus Manutius, “Dissert, cpistolica de Reati,” in Not. Thes. Aηtiη. Rοrn., i.; Angelotti, Descrizione, 1G35; Sclιenardi, Antiche lapidi, 1820; and Michaeli, Note per la storia di Rieti, 1868, 1870.
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