18. Aprile 2026

Pliny the Elder and the Ancient Roots of Wine in the Prosecco Hills

– The Ancient Origins of Prosecco Hills Viticulture

Some stories begin with certainty. This one begins with a road.

The Via Claudia Augusta Altinate — one of the great military and commercial arteries of the Roman Empire — ran from Altinum, the Roman Venice, northward through the Treviso foothills toward the Alps and beyond, connecting the Adriatic to the heart of Europe. It passed through this territory. Not beside it, not near it — through it.

The Romans were here.

The man who wrote everything down.

Gaius Plinius Secundus — Pliny the Elder — was born in 23 AD and died in 79 AD, suffocated by the ash of Vesuvius while trying to rescue survivors of the eruption that buried Pompeii. He was a soldier, a lawyer, an administrator, and one of the most obsessive researchers the ancient world ever produced. His Naturalis Historia — Natural History — runs to 37 volumes and covers everything from astronomy to zoology, from geography to agriculture.

And wine. Pliny wrote about wine with the attention of a man who understood that it was not merely a drink but a civilisation in liquid form.

The Pucinum — a wine that healed an empress.

Among the wines Pliny described, one stands out for its mystery and its geography. The Pucinum — produced somewhere in the north of what is now Italy — was considered so exceptional that it was credited with preserving the health of Livia, wife of Emperor Augustus, who reportedly drank it exclusively and lived to the age of 86.

Pliny wrote that she attributed her long life to this wine alone — a remarkable testimony from the most powerful woman in the Roman world.

Where exactly the Pucinum was produced remains one of history's open questions. And open questions, in a landscape as ancient as this one, are not a weakness. They are an invitation.

A road through the hills.

The Via Claudia Augusta Altinate was not a footpath. It was stone and engineering — a statement of Roman intention carved into the landscape. Along its route through the Treviso foothills, the evidence of Roman presence has surfaced over the centuries: coins, pottery, fragments of daily life, stretches of ancient paving with the unmistakable construction of Roman road-building.

These hills were not wilderness to the Romans. They were territory — known, travelled, inhabited, understood.

And the Romans understood vines.

Where Romans walked, vines followed.

The Romans brought viticulture with them across Europe with the same systematic determination they brought everything else — roads, aqueducts, law, language. They recognised good land for wine the way a general recognises good land for a battle: instinctively, and with consequences that lasted centuries.

The hills between Conegliano and Valdobbiadene — their steep southern slopes, their morning mist, their afternoon sun, their complex geology of limestone and ancient clay — are precisely the landscape that Roman viticulture sought. Not the easy plains, where grapes grow abundantly but without distinction. The difficult places. The places where the vine must search, and struggle, and in struggling, find its character.

Did Roman hands plant vines on these slopes? We cannot say with certainty. The evidence is suggestive, not conclusive. But suggestive evidence, in a landscape this ancient, carries its own kind of weight.

What we know is this: the Romans were here. They walked this ground. They built their road through these hills. And wherever in the ancient world the Romans stopped long enough to look at a hillside and recognise its potential, vines appeared.

Pliny would have understood.

Pliny the Elder did not romanticise wine. He studied it — its varieties, its geography, its relationship to soil and slope and climate. He would have recognised immediately what makes these hills extraordinary: the way the land tilts toward the sun, the way the limestone filters and holds water, the way the Dolomites on the northern horizon shape the winds that cool the grapes through the long summer evenings.

He wrote that the best wines came from vines that suffered. That struggle produced character. That easy land produced easy wine.

These hills have never been easy. And their wine has never been ordinary.

When you walk these hills with me, you walk on ground that Roman soldiers and merchants walked before you. The Via Claudia Augusta Altinate is still there, beneath centuries of soil and silence and vine roots. The hills are the same hills — the same slopes, the same light, the same evening wind descending from the mountains.

We do not know if Pliny knew this precise landscape. But we know the Romans were here. We know they valued this land enough to build a road through it. And we know that two thousand years of viticulture have proved, quietly and persistently, that someone made the right decision.

Pick up a glass of Prosecco from these hills. Close your eyes.

The story goes back further than you think