Lepontii, Rome and the first roads

The Lepontii and the Golasecca culture

The earliest inhabitants of the region who can be named are the Lepontii, a people whom Greek and Roman authors placed in the high valleys around the sources of the Rhine and the Rhône and on the southern slopes of the central Alps. Archaeologists associate the Iron Age population of the Ticino valleys and of the lakes with the Golasecca culture, named after a site on the Ticino river south of Lake Maggiore, which flourished from about the ninth to the fourth century BC and linked the Alpine valleys with the Etruscan and later Celtic world of the Po plain.¹ The large cemeteries of the Bellinzonese, above all those of Giubiasco and Castione, together with the finds of the Locarnese, have produced weapons, brooches, pottery and imported bronze vessels that show a population engaged in exchange with the south well before the Roman conquest.²

The Lepontii left inscriptions in a Celtic language written in an alphabet derived from the North Etruscan scripts, which scholars since the nineteenth century have called the "alphabet of Lugano" because several of the first known inscriptions were found in the Sottoceneri and around the lake.³ The Lepontic inscriptions, dating from about the sixth to the first century BC, are among the oldest written records of any Celtic language. For the economic historian they have a particular interest, because several of them appear on vessels and grave goods whose form and material indicate trade over considerable distances. The region thus entered history as a zone of passage between the Mediterranean and the Alpine north, recorded in writing from the start.

Common misconception. The name "Ticino" is sometimes taken to denote an ancient people or an old political unit. It denotes the river, the Latin Ticinus, which rises near the Nufenen and Gotthard and flows through Lake Maggiore into the Po at Pavia. The canton took the river's name only in 1803, when a territory of formerly separate bailiwicks needed a neutral name that favoured none of its towns.

Conquest and integration

Rome brought the Po plain under its control in the course of the second and first centuries BC, but the Alpine valleys were subdued only under Augustus. The campaigns of 16 and 15 BC, conducted by Drusus and Tiberius, secured the passes and the valleys. The trophy that the Senate erected at La Turbie above Monaco in 7/6 BC lists the Lepontii among the conquered Alpine peoples.⁴ After the conquest the southern part of the territory was attached to the municipal district of Comum (Como), which Caesar had strengthened in 59 BC by settling colonists there. The northern valleys were probably administered from the same city or remained under loose supervision. For the next four centuries the Sottoceneri and the Locarnese belonged to the hinterland of a Roman town whose citizens included the two Plinies, the elder a natural historian and the younger a senator and letter-writer who owned villas on Lake Como.⁵

The attachment to Como is the first appearance of a structural fact that runs through this chapter. The territory of today's canton was for most of its history a periphery of cities that lay outside it. Roman Como provided the courts, the markets and the magistrates. Its land register recorded the owners of the fields around Lugano and Mendrisio, whom its tax collectors then assessed. When the Roman administrative order dissolved, the church of Como inherited much of this role, which explains why the later diocese of Como covered the Sottoceneri and the Locarnese until the nineteenth century.⁶

Notes

1. DSS, art. "Leponti", https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/008018/; Treccani, Enciclopedia online, art. "Leponzi", https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/eol-leponzi/. The DSS dates the Golasecca group to which the Lepontii belonged from the seventh to the early fourth century BC, while the DSS art. "Ticino (cantone)" (above) gives the ninth to the fourth century for the culture as a whole. ↩
2. DSS, art. "Leponti" (above), on the cemeteries of the Bellinzonese (Arbedo, Giubiasco); DSS, art. "Ticino (cantone)" (above), section on prehistory. ↩
3. DSS, art. "Leponti" (above): the inscriptions are written in an alphabet derived from the Etruscan and conventionally called "of Lugano", and they date from the sixth to the first century BC. ↩
4. DSS, art. "Leponti" (above), dating the Tropaeum Alpium at La Turbie to 7/6 BC. The inscription is transmitted by Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia III.136–137. ↩
5. Treccani, Enciclopedia Italiana, art. "Como", https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/como_(Enciclopedia-Italiana)/, on Caesar's settlement of 5,000 colonists at Novum Comum and on the two Plinies. Primary sources: Strabo, Geographica V.1.6; Pliny the Younger, Epistulae I.3 and IX.7. ↩
6. DSS, art. "Como (diocesi)", https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007015/, on the Comasque jurisdiction over the Sottoceneri (with the exception of Capriasca) and over the pievi of Locarno and Bellinzona until the separation of the nineteenth century. ↩

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