View of Mount Soratte, in the Tiber valley, province of Rome.
According to tradition, the site was frequented by some priestly families, inhabiting the neighbouring town of Sora, who every year celebrated a ritual consisting in walking bare-footed on burning coals. They brought the name of Hirpi Sorani, term which, in the Sabine language, means “the wolves of Soranus”. Such an epithet, according to a local tale, had its origin from the verdict pronounced by an oracle, advising the ancestors of these families, if they wanted to escape a plague, to conduct a life of robberies and raids, behaving like wild wolves. The walking on burning coals can be interpreted as an access to the world of the dead, since the wolf assumes, in some Etruscan monuments, the role of subterranean demon. The priests took on themselves, in this way, the power of the wolves and identified themselves with the ancestors who had founded the ritual (Rissanen, 2012) . This cult was also associated with the goddess Feronia, a divinity of the springs and the woods, to whom were dedicated rugged and wild places. On Mount Soratte were worshiped the gods Mars and Soranus: the latter was a wild and warrior god, to whom was symbolically associated, as to Mars himself, the wolf (Comba, 1992, pp. 272-74).
With the advent of Christianity, the mountain admitted several hermitages and monastic refuges, among which, the most ancient was attributed to Saint Sylvester. It seems to grasp a continuity through time in the identification of this wild mountain with a place in which the human world could come into contact both with the animal and the divine dimension. The Sacred and the Wild are apparently two categories which, since the most ancient times, humans have tried to bring together on Mount Soratte.


[Image: http://www.lenola.it/2013/06/22/granfondo-del-monte-soratte-ecco-il-percorso-nel-dettaglio/]