The Vestini - The Piceni

The Vestini (Fig. 1) were located in the central Abruzzo, along the long hydrographical basin known as Aternus/Pescara valley system, running from the inner Apennine mountains to the coast. The river Saline was the northern boundary along the coast, while the southern boundary was the Aternum river, creating a very narrow outlet to the sea, but quite crucial from an economic point of view. Concerning the Piceni, the area formally known as Picenum certainly represents a quite problematic ethnic and geographic unit, both in terms of the tribal groups inhabiting this region, as well as its boundaries (Fig. 1). The concept of Picenum, as a homogeneous region, in the scholarly literature is mainly based on the Roman sources, which give quite a late geographical and cultural picture of this territory when it became the Augustan Regio V-Picenum, delimited by the Esino valley to the north and the Saline river valley to the south. In earlier periods, however, the situation seems to have been slightly different concerning the boundaries