Anna Perenna

Roman coin of the 82 B.C., representing on the front side Anna Perenna and on the back a four-horses chariot driven by Victory, from a private collection.
On the Ides of March (March 15) was celebrated a feast in honor of Anna Perenna, a figure whose nature remains uncertain. The Romans, according to their tendency to historicize the mythological traditions, were inclined to see her as the sister of Dido, queen of Carthage, a female personage who, arrived in Italy, became a river Nymph. However, her name derives surely from annare et perennare, a traditional formula with which it was wished to spend an happy new year. Anna Perenna was thus a goddess who personified the new year, beginning again in the month of March. The feast implied sacrifices offered in a sacred grove on the Tiber shores and a picnic, where eating and drinking wine were accompanied by dancing and singing, among which also obscene chants performed by young girls.
Between 1999 and 2000, during the excavations for the construction of an underground parking near piazza Euclide in Rome, have been discovered the remains of a fountain, with votive inscriptions dedicated to Anna Perenna and to the Nymphs, a cave and a cistern, with offerings datable to about the IV century A.D. The complex should be located in the ancient sacred grove of Anna Perenna. From the number of magical objects that have been found (oil lamps containing strips of lead with inscriptions of magical formulas and anthropomorphic figurines molded with wax and closed into lead containers) it can be deduced the progressive transformation of the ceremonies practiced in this place, which, from a fertility and new-year propitiating cult, evidenced until about the II century A.D., has gradually turned into a practice with more and more magical and nocturnal connotations (Piranomonte 2002).

[Image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s0289.html]