Overview
The Sepino Archaeological Park was established in 2021 by the Ministry of Culture to protect and enhance the ruins of the ancient city of Saepinum, the "little Pompeii" of Molise, located in the locality of Altilia about 3 km from the village of Sepino. The Romans built it at the bottom of the valley after having conquered, in 293 BC, the Samnite city of Saipins; of the latter, which stood at an altitude of about 950 metres on the mountain behind, the wall remains in the area of Terravecchia.
The archaeological area of Saepinum is much richer. Even the walls, more than 1 km long and punctuated by numerous towers, and the monumental entrance gates, resembling triumphal arches, testify to its exceptional value. Prominent among them is Porta Bojano, at the northern end of the decumanus. Within the city, the jewels are the basilica, with columns crowned by capitals of various kinds, and above all the Roman Theatre, which harmoniously blends the monumental dimension with the rural one. On the hemicycle of steps, between the 1700s and the early 1900s, in fact, some peasant houses overlapped, taking up the curvilinear trend; today they are home to the Museum of the City and the Territory, which exhibits important archaeological finds from prehistory in a context of peasant everyday life. A particularity that reveals the ancient link of this land with agricultural and especially pastoral tradition is the unusual setting of the thistle and the decumanus, the two main axes of the city, which unlike the usual, are not perfectly orthogonal. Saepinum in fact founded where two road axes already crossed, probably used by shepherds for transhumance, the one that descends from Matese towards the plain of the Tammaro River and a stretch of what is known as Tratturo Pescasseroli-Candela.
