Water Management and Agricultural Exploitation Beyond the Southern City Wall of Falerii Novi

Falerii Novi, in the heart of the ager Faliscus, offers an unrivalled opportunity to investigate the peri-urban landscape of a Roman town. The paper presents some of the results of a research project that has been looking at the entire peri-urban landscape of Falerii Novi through a multidisciplinary approach, including extensive geophysical surveys, pedestrian surveys, and targeted excavation. The paper focuses on the area to the south of the city, where a series of geomorphological and archaeological features have been newly detected. The results have revealed that despite the artificial and natural boundaries of the city (i.e., the city wall and the steep ravine of the Rio Purgatorio), the community's efforts in managing, exploiting, and occupying the peri-urban area were substantial. The paper presents the newly recorded evidence of the significant effort put into water management as one of the key factors in shaping the landscape, demonstrating how the geological composition of the territory conditioned the engineering solutions adopted. Finally, the discussion focuses on the discovery of an agricultural area, likely a mixed cultivation system relating to the production of a surplus by the inhabitants of a large suburban villa.