An intact Roman town with gates, forum and theatre in the open countryside
In a green valley at the foot of the Matese mountains, in the municipality of Sepino, in the province of Campobasso, lie the ruins of Saepinum, a small Roman town that is one of the best preserved and most evocative archaeological sites of southern Italy, known today as Altilia. Founded on the site of a Samnite settlement, after the Roman conquest of the area in the third century BC, it developed at the crossing between a road and the tratturo, the grassy track of the transhumance that connected the mountains of Abruzzo with the plains of Apulia, along which the flocks moved every year, and this route still crosses the town, becoming its main street.
Saepinum is surrounded by an intact ring of walls, about 1,250 metres long, built under Augustus, with four monumental gates, the Porta Bojano, decorated with statues of barbarian prisoners, the Porta Tammaro, the Porta Benevento and the Porta Terravecchia, and inside you can walk along the paved streets among the forum, the basilica, with its Ionic columns, the temples, the market, the houses, the shops and the theatre, whose curved structure was incorporated into peasant farmhouses built in the eighteenth century, which are still inhabited and part of the site, creating a unique blend of ancient and rural life. The site is immersed in the countryside, among fields and grazing cows, in a silent and timeless atmosphere. Two small museums display the finds from the excavations.
Tip: enter through the Porta Bojano and walk along the tratturo; visit in spring or at sunset, when the light is warm.
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