OTRICOLI. - Ancient diocese in Umbria, in the province of Terni, situated along the route of the Via Flaminia on a hill dominating the Tiber valley.
The Umbrian center of Ocriculum, after 308 B.C., would have become, according to Livy, an ally of the Romans. From 220 it was a station on the Via Flaminia; during the Social War it sided with the Italics and was completely devastated; perhaps after that event it was transferred to the plain near the Tiber. It was a municipium of region VI, enrolled in the Arnensian tribe, and enjoyed a certain prosperity during the Empire. According to Hydatius, in 413 a bloody battle would have taken place near O. between the troops of Honorius and Heraclian. In the Middle Ages the site of the Roman city was abandoned and the settlement moved back to the hill where the Umbrian center had been. After having belonged to the Roman duchy, O. passed among the domains of the Church; in 1433 it was occupied by Francesco Sforza; in 1547 G. B. Savelli was invested with it. Pius VI, between 1776 and 1786, had systematic excavations carried out there which yielded numerous works of art to the Vatican Museums, among them the celebrated bust of Jupiter.
The patron of O. is St. Victor, whose feast is celebrated on May 14. There are also venerated there Sts. Fulgentius, Eleozamus, Nestorius, Leopardus and Corona, whose relics were transferred in 1316 to the collegiate church of O., as well as St. Medicus, whose body was found in 1611 in the Christian cemetery of St. Victor.
O. was an ancient diocese; there are mentions of it from the 5th century and the bishops Heracles (487), Constantine (499), Dominic (595 and 601) and St. Fulgentius are known, who sat around the middle of the 6th century and whom Totila, passing through O., first imprisoned and then released following a miraculous event narrated by St. Gregory the Great. At the beginning of the 7th century the records of the diocese are lost, as it was absorbed by that of Narni.
Below the present-day O. there exist notable remains of the Roman city, largely to be ascribed to the Augustan period: a theater, an amphitheater, a large arcaded structure, the baths of L. Iulius Iuliius of the 2nd century A.D., from which comes the well-known mosaic of the Vatican Rotunda. The collegiate church of St. Mary, of which there are records from the middle of the 12th century, preserves the 6th-century inscription placed by St. Fulgentius on the altar of St. Victor.
The monastery of St. Victor near the ruins of the Roman city (remains of the 11th-12th century) arose near the church erected in the 6th century by St. Fulgentius to hold the body of that saint which he had found. Gregory IX in 1232 assigned this monastery to the bishop of Narni; it was later by right and property of the Roman Church. An underground cemetery was attached to it. Recently the remains of a place of Christian worship have appeared near the area where the Roman Basilica must have stood: there have been found an inscription placed by a Marcellus (probably a presbyter) on the occasion of the construction of a baptistery, a votive inscription of a Mercurius (6th-7th century) and a monogrammatic bronze cross (5th century).
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Carlo Pietrangeli