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The Rubicon (; ; ) is a shallow river in northeastern Italy, just south of Cesena and north of Rimini. It was known as Fiumicino until 1933, when it was identified with the ancient river Rubicon, crossed by Julius Caesar in 49 BC. The river flows for around from the Apennine Mountains to the Adriatic Sea through the south of the Emilia-Romagna region, between the towns of Rimini and Cesena.
According to Suetonius, Caesar uttered the famous phrase alea iacta est ('the dice is cast') upon crossing the Rubicon, signifying that his action was irreversible. Lives of the Caesars, "Divus Julius" sect. 32. Suetonius gives the Latin version, iacta alea est, although, according to Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Caesar quoted a line from the playwright Menander: ἀνερρίφθω κύβος, anerríphthō kȳbos, 'let the die be cast'. Suetonius's subtly different translation is often also quoted as alea iacta est. The phrase "crossing the Rubicon" is now used to refer to committing irrevocably to a grave course of action, similar to the modern phrase "passing the point of no return," but with the added connotation of risking danger. The presence of Caesar and his legion in Italy forced Pompey, the Roman consul, and a large part of the senate to flee Rome. Caesar's victory in the subsequent civil war ensured that he would never be punished for his actions.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and during the first centuries of the Middle Ages, the coastal plain between Ravenna and Rimini was flooded many times. The Rubicon, like other small rivers of the region, often changed its course during this period. For this reason, and to supply fields with water after the revival of agriculture in the late Middle Ages, during the 14th and 15th centuries, hydraulic works were built to prevent other floods and to regulate streams. As a result of this work, these rivers started to flow in straight courses, as they do today.
The Via Aemilia (modern SS 9) still follows its original Roman course as it runs between the hills and the plain; it would have been the obvious course to follow as it was the only major Roman road east of the Apennine Mountains leading to and from the Po Valley. Attempts to deduce the original course of the Rubicon can be made only by studying written documents and other archaeological evidence such as Roman milestones, which indicate the distance between the ancient river and the nearest Roman towns. The mile zero of a Roman road, from which distances were counted, was always the crossing between the Cardo and the Decumanus, the two principal streets in every Roman town, running north–south and east–west respectively. In a section of the Tabula Peutingeriana, a medieval copy of a Late Antique document showing the network of Roman roads, a river in northeastern Italy labeled " fl. Rubicum" is shown at a position 12 Roman miles () north of Rimini along the coastline; this is the distance between Rimini and a place called "Ad Confluentes," drawn west of the Rubicon, on the Via Aemilia. However, the river-bed shape observed in Pisciatello and the Rubicon river in the present day, well below Roman-age soil layers, is likely to indicate that any possible course modification of rivers could have occurred only very close to the coastline, and therefore only slight.
Furthermore, the features of the present-day Rubicon river (north–south course, orthogonal to the Via Aemilia) and the Via Aemilia itself (a straight reach before and after the crossing, and a turn just passing by , so marking a possible administrative boundary) are common to typical geographical oriented limits of Roman age, being what made this a clue of actual identification of the present-day Rubicon River with the Fiumicino.Gianluca Bottazzi (Università di Parma), Le centuriazioni di Ariminum: prospettive di ricerca.
In 1933, after various efforts that spanned centuries, the Fiumicino, which crossed the town of Savignano di Romagna (now Savignano sul Rubicone), was officially identified as the former Rubicon. Strong evidence supporting this theory came in 1991,Pignotti R., Ravagli P., Donati G., "Rubico quondam finis Italiae", Città del Rubicone, p. 3, October, 1991 when three Italian scholars (Pignotti, Ravagli, and Donati), after a comparison between the Tabula Peutingeriana and other ancient sources (including Cicero), showed that the distance from Rome to the Rubicon River was 200 Roman miles. Key elements of their work are:
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