Originally Published: 2002-07-21

NEWCASTLE, Britain - During a visit to the distant Roman colony of Britannia in 122 C.E., Hadrian, the philosopher emperor also known for his brutal suppression of a Jewish revolt in Palestine, realized that Rome's defence system had a hole right here, near the far north of this country; a hole that allowed the Celts to descend undisturbed from Caledonia, as Scotland was then called.
He therefore ordered the construction of a massive wall, 76 miles long, stretching from the mouth of River Tyne on the North Sea, where today's Newcastle stands, to the Salway Firth, the great fjord on the Atlantic where Carlisle was built, that became known as Hadrian's Wall.
It was not an impenetrable barrier, and in fact the Celts crossed it more than once. But from the forts (castra) located at regular intervals along the wall, the Roman legions launched timely counterattacks against the barbarians, and the military balance was re-established.
The system held for almost three centuries, until the fall of the Roman Empire turned the Wall into an near inexhaustible mine of ready-made construction materials: the stones used to build it were systematically looted for building houses in Northumberland and Cumbria. But ever since, Hadrian's Wall evoked in the collective imagination of Mediterranean-tempered Italians a faraway place, on the borders of the known world; a cold place, difficult to reach and to go beyond.
In the last century, Italian immigrants to modern Britain reached Hadrian's Wall and went beyond it. To the descendants of the staunch warriors who had caused so much trouble to Roman legions they taught how to eat gelato and pasta, introduced baba and panettone, medlars, figs and artichokes; and that thin-crust pizza baked in the oven is much better than thick-crust pizza baked in a pan or, even worse, fried.
The pax romana that arms could not guarantee is nowadays ensured by food. This is proved by almost 150 Italian restaurants in Newcastle, the highest number among non-Italian cities of 280,000 people.

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