Roman Umbria

Roman Umbria is a modern name for one of the 11 administrative regions into which the emperor Augustus divided Italy. The main source for the regions is the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder, who informs his readers he is basing the geography of Italy on the discriptio Italiae, "division of Italy," made by Augustus. The Sexta Regio ("6th Region") is called Umbria complexa agrumque Gallicam citra Ariminium, "Umbria including the Gallic country this side of Rimini."

Umbria is named after a proto-Italic people, the Umbri, who were gradually subjugated by the Romans in the 4th through the 2nd centuries BC. Although it passed the name on to the modern region of Umbria, the two coincide only partially. Roman Umbria extended from Narni in the South, northeastward to the neighborhood of Ravenna on the Adriatic coast, thus including a large part of central Italy that now belongs to the Marche; at the same time, it excluded the Sabine country (generally speaking, the area around modern Norcia) and the right bank of the Tiber, which formed part of Roman Etruria: for example Perusia (the modern Perugia) was not part of Roman Umbria; and Sarsina, the birthplace of Plautus, is regularly stated to have been "in Umbria" — which it was, but is not now: Sarsina is in the modern province of Forlì, in Emilia-Romagna.

The importance of Umbria in Roman and medieval times was intimately bound up with the Via Flaminia, the consular road that supplied Rome and served as a military highway into and out of the City: for this reason once the Roman empire collapsed, Umbria became a strategic battleground fought over by the Church, the Lombards and the Byzantines, and suffered consequently, becoming partitioned among them and disappearing from history. The modern use of "Umbria" is due to a renaissance of local identity in the 17th century.

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