Laiche e religiose

The roman legal culture restricts the woman's universe within a perimeter in which she must exclusively have the qualities that make her a good wife and a good mother, so that she will guarantee the ethical foundation and blood of Rome. The ancient world, that was surely conservative, seeks to preserve as immutable the cornerstones of confidentiality and silence based on the abstract model of the mulier who looks after the family home and her castitas: shared values to be preserved. The sources of the age of the principality seem to show that this ideal woman only correponds with some limited and marginal aspects to the female reality. The young girls that were consecrated to Vesta, during the transition to the religious dimension, became, instead, different from belonging to the female sex. The religious woman is the expression of a specific nature which places her outside and beyond the rules governing the roles, responsibilities and rights of the Roman world: the Vestal is sui generis figure.