In medieval times, at the foot of an imposing castle, lay the lively village of Brusaporto. The town, located a short distance from Bergamo, was first mentioned in 1260 in a census requested by the Holy See, which attested to its existence under the name “Ecclesia S.tae Margheritae de Brusaporco“1. The reasons for this particular place name, derived from popular tradition, have never been fully clarified. The attempts to trace its origins have been lost in pure legend. For example, a tale states that in the 13th century, the inhabitants of the village attacked the feudal lord’s castle shouting “Brucia, porco!” (“Burn, pig!”). It is unclear whether this curious episode has its roots in a real event. All that remains of the medieval fortress are a few ruins, including a mysterious palindromic inscription that has emerged from the past: “sator arepo tenet opera rotas“.
Brusaporto Castle
Brusaporto Castle, built on a gentle hill overlooking the town like a sentinel, belonged to the Guelph Rivola family. The stronghold was part of a larger castle complex that protected that area of Bergamo. It also included the nearby fortresses of Costa di Mezzate, Monticelli and Comonte. These castles, located on the Tomenone hill and in the surrounding territories, were all built between the 12th and 13th centuries. In 1380, the powerful Ghibellines Bernabò and Rodolfo Visconti ordered the siege and burning of the Guelph stronghold at Brusaporto. From that moment on, the castle was never used again2. Today, only the original layout and a few other ruins remain of the medieval structure. From the bottom of the valley, a staircase leads to the top of the hill, where the main body of the fortress once stood, now a bare esplanade.
The mysterious Sator inscription
Even the abandoned stones of a castle can hide unsuspected mysteries. In Brusaporto, on a wall running along the perimeter of the slope, opposite the entrance to the fort, there is a block of sandstone with an arcane palindromic inscription.
The slab, square and about 50 centimetres long, has lost part of the inscription on its lower side. However, scholars are well familiar with its Latin phrase, which consists of five words of five letters each. This is, in fact, an engraving of the Sator Square, one of the most famous enigmas of ancient and medieval archaeology.
The difficult interpretation of the Sator Square
Archaeologists have found the Sator Square in various parts of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Matteo della Corte discovered the oldest inscription among the ruins of Pompeii: it dates back to before 79 AD, the year in which an eruption of Vesuvius buried the city. However, due to its palindromic nature, the Sator inscription enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages, when people used it as a magical talisman to ward off evil. The inscription is difficult to translate because the term arepo is a hapax legomenon, meaning that it is not found in any other Latin text, while the other words can have various interpretations:
- SATOR is the “sower” or, in Christian terms, the “Creator”.
- AREPO
- TENET, third person singular, means to hold, support or guide.
- OPERA could be the ablative “with care”, or correspond to the accusative plural of opus, “the works”.
- ROTAS is an accusative plural. Therefore, the term refers to “wheels” or, metaphorically, the “celestial spheres”.
Arepo could be a proper name. In this case the translation of the Sator would be: “The sower Arepo carefully holds the wheels”3. Some authors, such as J. Carcopino, have argued that the term may derive from the land measurement arepennis used in Gaul, meaning “plough”. Thus, the phrase from the Sator could be translated as: “The sower, with his plough, holds the wheels with care”4.
The enigmatic Sator inscription of Brusaporto Castle
Why do we find the Sator Square engraved near the ancient castle of Brusaporto? What was the meaning of the inscription in that particular local context? The sandstone block with the palindromic inscription is of a different type from the other stones that form the wall. We know that the Municipality of Brusaporto began redevelopment work on the castle area in 1984. Perhaps, on that occasion, the surrounding wall, that acts as a support structure for the embankment, was rearranged. It cannot therefore be ruled out that the Sator slab was added on that occasion. Previously, the epigraph was likely situated among the ruins of Rivola Castle or within a chapel in the vicinity.
In the 13th and 14th centuries, master builders used sandstone, soft and easy to work with but also more prone to flaking, to create architectural elements such as doorposts and lintels, or ornamental blocks for interiors. Palaeographic analysis also seems to confirm the medieval origins of the Brusaporto inscription. It shows similarities to the example engraved in Siena Cathedral, dating back to the 13th century. In particular, almost all the letters are superimposable. The exceptions in the Brusaporto Sator are the first “e” in tenet, which is more geometric, and the “a” with a chevron. The characters are both uncial and capital, a mixture typical of the transitional style between the Romanesque and Gothic periods. In terms of its function, we can assume that, as in other documented cases, the Sator Square of Brusaporto was intended to ward off evil from the castle.
Samuele Corrente Naso
Notes
- L. Chiodi, Chiese di Bergamo sottoposte a censo circa il 1260, in Archivio storico lombardo, 1960. ↩︎
- Johanes Mozi de Brembat, a banker who lived between 1325 and 1409, reports in a Chronicle: “Giacomo Pii Capitanio di Bergamo et Giovanni Lisca, provisionato di Bernabò (Visconti) […] svaligiato Brusaporto, senza pietà l’abbruciorno”. ↩︎
- R. G. Collingwood, The Archaeology of Roman Britain, London, 1930. ↩︎
- J. Carcopino, Le Christianisme secret du “carré magique”, Museum Helveticum, vol. 5, n. 1, 1948. ↩︎
