Ad Gallinas Albas

The Barrington Atlas Directory notes: Prima Porta

The toponym Ad Gallinas Albas has a complex history and several scholarly opinions have been asserted as to how this toponym should be interpreted and to which precise location it ought to refer. In his Natural History, the elder Pliny discusses an omen involving a white hen (gallina alba). This story relates to an event that transpired on the day that Livia Drusilla was to wed Octavian (17 January 38 B.C.). On that day, according to Pliny, an eagle dropped the white hen onto Livia's lap. She found that it was clutching a branch of laurel in its beak. She was advised to raise the bird and its offspring and to plant the twig. The laurel tree that resulted provided wreaths for triumphant generals in the imperial period.

An inscription discovered in the river Tiber in 1909 also has bearing on this toponym. This text was discovered near the ancient pons Aelius (Ponte S. Angelo) while the twentieth-century bridge known as Ponte Vittorio Emanuele was being built. The text mentions subdivisions (praetoria) of imperial properties along the Via Flaminia in the northern suburbium of Rome. These four divisions include one that corresponds to ad Gallinas albas, namely Gallinarum albarum. In Ashby's 1921 discussion of the toponym as it relates to the Via Flaminia, he conflates the two toponyms - the ancient ad Gallinas albas and the modern Prima Porta, the latter of which likely corresponded, in turn, with the statio referred to as "ad rubras".