Enciclopedia Cattolica

TIMAVO

Timavus

Volume XII · p. 86 · 1954

English translation · Testo originale italiano

TIMAVO. - Le foci del fiume, che dopo 40 km. di corso sotterraneo sgorga dalla roccia sul mare, furono sede di un culto antichissimo che il mito fa risalire a Diomede esule da Troia.
TIMAVO. - Le foci del fiume, che dopo 40 km. di corso sotterraneo sgorga dalla roccia sul mare, furono sede di un culto antichissimo che il mito fa risalire a Diomede esule da Troia.

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

TIMAVO. — The river’s sources, which after 40 km of underground course gush from the rock onto the sea, were the site of an ancient cult that myth traces back to Diomedes exiled from Troy.

The purifying waters marked the boundary between the Veneti and the Histri (and, up to Caesar, the boundary of Italy); they had a Roman sanctuary and were celebrated by Virgil. In the Christian age, the cult continued in the same place, where St John the Baptist was venerated; recent excavations have uncovered a three-aisled basilica of the 5th century, rebuilt in the 11th and again at the end of the 15th in an elegant Gothic structure, recently restored, which attests to the persistent continuity of the prayer site.

BIBL.: R. Pichler, Il castello di Duino, Trento 1882; B. Fortati-Tamaro, in Notizie degli scavi, 1925, p. 1 ff. Mario Mirabella Roberti