the falling tower of pizza the leaning tower of pisa at night

Emperor Augustus fortified the colony into an important port and changed the name to Colonia Iulia obsequens.

In 89 BC, Portus Pisanus became a municipium.

In 180 BC, it became a Roman colony under Roman law, as Portus Pisanus. Pisa served as a base for Roman naval expeditions against Ligurians and Gauls. Pisa took advantage of being the only port along the western coast between Genoa (then a small village) and Ostia. The maritime role of Pisa should have been already prominent if the ancient authorities ascribed to it the invention of the naval ram.

The Virgilian commentator Servius wrote that the Teuti founded the town 13 centuries before the start of the common era. Virgil, in his Aeneid, states that Pisa was already a great center by the times described and gives the epithet of Alphēae to the city because it was said to have been founded by colonists from Pisa in Elis, near which the Alpheius river flowed. Īncient Roman authors referred to Pisa as an old city. Īlthough throughout history there have been several uncertainties about the origin of the city of Pisa, excavations made in the 1980s and 1990s found numerous archaeological remains, including the fifth century BC tomb of an Etruscan prince, proving the Etruscan origin of the city, and its role as a maritime city, showing that it also maintained trade relations with other Mediterranean civilizations. The most believed hypothesis is that the origin of the name Pisa comes from Etruscan and means 'mouth', as Pisa is at the mouth of the Arno river. For a chronological guide, see Timeline of Pisa.

The falling tower of pizza the leaning tower of pisa at night