Sepino and Pietrabbondante

Molise was the land of the Samnites, the people who held Rome off for seventy years before losing. Two places survive from those wars that can be visited in the same day and that tell the two sides of the story: one Samnite and one Roman.

Saepinum, which everyone calls Altilia, lies at the foot of the Matese near Sepino. It is a Roman town of small size but almost complete: the circuit of walls with its four gates, the paved main street, the forum, the basilica, the theatre, the baths. Nobody built on top of it, which is why it survived; among the ruins still stand the farmhouses of the peasants who lived inside it in the nineteenth century. Entry is free.

Pietrabbondante

The Samnite sanctuary of Pietrabbondante stands at nine hundred metres, on a terrace looking over half of Molise. The theatre, from the second century BC, has front-row seats shaped to take the sitter's back, and it is the only known example; behind it is the temple, and in front nothing but the valley. The roads up are narrow, and over the last few kilometres you go slowly.

A drove road also passed close to Saepinum, and that is no accident: the town began as a halting place on the road of the flocks, and its gates were built wide enough for animals to pass. On one of the gates there is still an inscription settling the disputes between the shepherds and the townspeople, cut in the first century AD.

The two sites are an hour apart. For anyone camping on the coast they make a full day, with Campobasso or Agnone in between; it is worth checking the opening times out of season, because in winter they shorten.