Temple of Fortuna Primigenia

The sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia was an ancient Roman, extra-urban religious complex founded in Praeneste by Publius Sempronius Tuditanus in 204 BC. The temple within the sanctuary was dedicated to the goddess Fortuna Primigenia, or Fortune of the First Born.^[1] Parents brought their newly-born first child to the temple in order to improve its likelihood of surviving infancy and perpetuating the gens.

The remains of the sanctuary still standing today were built sometime around 120 BC^[2] as a spectacular series of terraces, exedras and porticos on four levels down the hillside, linked by monumental stairs and ramps. The inspiration for this feat of integrated urbanistic design lay not in republican Rome but in the Hellenistic monarchies of the eastern Mediterranean. Praeneste foreshadowed the grandiose Imperial style of the following generation.^[3]

Reconstruction of the temple of the Fortuna Primigenia by Palladio.

The sanctuary of Fortune occupies a series of five vast terraces, which, resting on gigantic masonry substructures and connected with each other by grand staircases, rise one above the other on the hill in the form of the side of a pyramid, crowned on the highest terrace by the round temple of Fortune, today incorporated into the Palazzo Colonna Barberini.^[3] This immense edifice, probably by far the largest sanctuary in Italy, must have presented a most imposing aspect, visible as it was from a great part of Latium, from Rome, and even from the sea.

The goddess Fortuna here went by the epithet of Primigenia ("Original"), she was represented suckling two babes, as in the Christian representation of Charity, said to be Jupiter and Juno, and she was especially worshipped by matrons.^[4] The oracle continued to be consulted down to Christian times, until Constantine the Great, and again later Theodosius I, forbade the practice and closed the temple.

Features of the temple influenced Roman garden design on steeply sloped sites through Antiquity and once again in Italian villa gardens from the 15th century. The monument to Victor Emmanuel II in Rome owes a lot to the Praeneste sanctuary complex.

See also[]

• List of Ancient Roman temples
• The Nile mosaic

References[]

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