Beyond the borders. Transformations, acculturation, and adaptation between Lazio and Campania during the Lombard Period (6th – 8th centuries)

With the arrival of the Lombards in the Italian peninsula (AD 568), the region between Lazio and Campania, geographically characterised by the presence of the Garigliano and Volturno River Valleys flowing into the Tyrrhenian Sea, starts to be configured as a ‘borderland’. Indeed, more than a real frontier, this wide area, located between the Roman towns of Aquinum and Capua, would play the role of a buffer zone between the Lombard Duchies of Spoleto and Benevento and the Duchy of Rome, namely part of the Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna, practically ruled by the popes of Rome. A revision of former studies and a new season of research are bringing to light a composite reality, where conversion of economic activities, transformations of settlement patterns, acculturation phenomena, alteration of the social and ethnical assets, and changes in the communication networks occurred in towns and countryside. This paper presents this new data and discusses the changes, focusing on the period between the infiltration and the settling of the Lombards (during the last 30 years of the 6th century AD) and the arrival of the Carolingians (at the start of the 9th century)