AUFIDENA  , an

ancient city of the Samnites Caraceni, the site of which is just north of the modern Alfedena,' Italy, a station on the railway between Sulmona and Isernia, 37 M. from the latter . Its remains are fully and accurately described by L . Mariani in Monumenti dei Lincei (1901), 225 seq.: cf . Notizie degli scavi, 1901, 442 seq.; 1902, 516 seq . The ancient city occupied two hills, both over 3800 ft. above sea-level (in the valley between were found the supposed remains of the later forum), and the walls, of rough Cyclopean work, were over a mile in ' Two churches here contain paintings of interest in the history of Abruzzese art, and one of them, the Madonna del Campo, contained fragments of a temple of considerable size . AUGEREAU length . A fortified outpost lay on a still higher hill to the north . Not very much is as yet known of the city itself (though one public building of the 5th century B.C. was excavated in 'Igor, and a small sanctuary in 1902), attention having been chiefly devoted to the necropolis which lay below it; 1400 tombs had already been examined in 1908, though this number is conjectured to be only a sixteenth of the whole . They are all inhumation burials, of the advanced iron age, and date from the 7th to the 4th century B.C., falling into three classes—those without coffin, those with a coffin formed of stone slabs, and those with a coffin formed of tiles . The objects discovered are preserved in a museum on the spot . In the Roman period we find Aufidena figuring as a post station on the road between Sulmo and Aesernia, which, however, runs past Castel di Sangro, crossing the river by an ancient bridge some 5 M. to the north-east . Castel di Sangro has remains of ancient walls, but these are attributed to a road by Mariani, and in any case the fortified area there was quite small, only one-sixteenth the size of Aufidena .

The attempted

identification of Castel di Sangro with Aufidena must therefore be 'rejected, though we must allow that it was probably the Roman post station; the ancient city, since its capture by the Romans in the 3rd century B.C., having lost something of its importance . (T .