Porta Salaria
The Porta Salaria was a gate of the Aurelian Walls in Rome that existed until it was demolished in 1921. It was flanked by two semi-circular towers and bore a single passage. The road that ran through it in the days of the Roman Empire was called the Via Salaria nova, which merged with the Via Salaria vetus outside the city.
History
As with the rest of the Aurelian Walls, the construction of the Porta Salaria was commissioned by the Emperor Aurelian around the last quarter of the 3rd century.
In 410, it was through this gate that the King of the Visigoths, Alaric I, entered Rome with his army and commenced his infamous sacking of the city, heralding the decline of the Western Roman Empire. Unlike other gates, the Porta Salaria was not given a Christian name during the Middle Ages, which the Assassin Shaun Hastings speculated may have owed to its "failure" to defend Rome.
Trivia
The Porta Tiburtina, mislabeled as the Porta Salaria in the game
- In Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, all the gates are misidentified, though Shaun Hastings's database entries remain factually correct. As a result, the gate marked as the Porta Salaria in the game is actually the Porta Tiburtina while the actual Porta Salaria is misnamed the Porta Flaminia. For convenience, this article assumes, that canonically, Shaun Hasting's research is correct while the Animus 2.01 labeled the gates erroneously.