Today we drove to Saepinum, about an hour away from Guardialfiera. Saepinum was an ancient Roman provincial village. However, it was a bit of a backwater place, so after the Roman Empire fell, the town just slogged along until it was sacked by the Saracens in the 9th century. (Although Wikipedia says that the town was abandoned in the 4th century, so I’m not sure how the Saracens could sack a town that was already abandoned.)
an entry portal to the old Roman town
another entry portal
and just for giggles, here’s another arch
If you go onto Google Maps and click on the Layers button in the bottom left corner of Google Maps, you get a satellite view of Saepinum which is very interesting:
You can see the old walls around the town, the foundations of houses, and entry gates of the town. The town had some main streets, a couple of temples, a grocery market, some shops, a public bath, an amphitheater, a public fountain, and a water mill for grinding corn and other grains.
walking around the walls outside of the village
columns from the old temple
What is most interesting about this place is that, because it was an out-of-the-way backwater place, it was never demolished or paved over or buried like other sites around Italy. It has been left largely undisturbed as an entire village.
I love all of the spring flowers growing around the foundations of this old house
an old Roman mosaic
after the Roman times, people scavanged building materials to build new structures, so you can see things like this this…
When you go to Rome, you see the ancient Roman buildings or foundations but you look down onto them because the city has been built up and on top of the old history. With Saepinum, you are literally walking on the old streets, through the old arches, and among the old foundations of buildings.
a road in Saepinum
the foundations of old Roman houses – I haven’t figured out if these are just stone foundations and the wooden walls are gone, or if there were stone walls on top
Most of Saepinum is original, but there are exceptions. At the Roman amphitheater, there are some medieval houses that were built on top of the theater seating. (The original theater could seat 3,000 people, so you just see a fraction of the seating here.)
the Saepinum amphitheater – this was just escavated in the 1970s, the houses that you see are “new” and were built in the medieval times
Apparently, this village was mostly abandoned, but now people have started moving back to restore old houses and reinvigorate old farms. We heard lots of chickens. We saw a couple of residents. We saw some big white dogs that looked like polar bears. And we saw a surprising number of tourists, considering it was a cloudy, rainy Sunday morning in April in rural Molise Italy.
curious cows
And I was obsessed with the patterns of lichen while we were there.
lichen on tree bark
lichen and moss on rocks
On the way home, we took the scenic route through the mountains. I’m not sure if this was on purpose or if we accidentally took a detour. In any case, it was a beautiful drive. And then we were on the verge of being hangry so we found a restaurant in the middle of nowhere to eat some lunch and had a two-hour lunch, because, well, Italy.
our appetizer at lunch today – this was just our appetizer! but so delicious. and then we had pasta…
Your super photos always give extra meaning to the narratives.
The lasting benefits of living in a backwater and forgotten…