A vast plain, crowned by the Matese mountains and crossed by rivers that flow majestically down to the sea. Fertile and welcoming, like the womb of Mater matuta, the goddess of Aurora and fertility to whom the ancient Italic populations were devoted, who found the ideal conditions in that land to settle and progress. Oscan, Etruscan, Samnite peoples and, first of all, the Leborini, from whom Pliny the Elder borrowed the names Laboriae and Campi Laborini referring to the large area between the Aurunci Mountains to the north and the Campi Flegrei to the south. Largely corresponding to the ager campanus, the thriving territory of Capua, the oldest city of Rome, which in the fifth century BC, its heyday, was second only to the Urbe.