Imagine one Host in miniature, but like this one largely intact. Imagine that this city, all surrounded by walls, lies there, in the middle of the countryside and that you can enter freely. You have arrived at Sepino, the second archaeological site in Molise that deeply impressed me and whose existence I was unaware of. We are at the foot of the Matese mountains, which separate Molise and Campania.
Sepino stands at the point where an important one passed tratturo, the one that united Pescasseroli to Candela. The Roman city rose not far from a previous Samnite settlement, and was built on the plain according to the classical principles of the crossing between a cardo maximum and a decumanum. Later it was entirely surrounded by walls, mostly still erect and intact and beautiful, made of cubes of white stone placed diagonally; the city gates are also beautiful, one of which, Porta Benevento, resists the centuries with its beautiful circular towers that flank it.
Sepino is beautiful and magical: there are an amphitheater, the thermal baths, the macellum (i.e. the market), the hole with columns still standing, sources, tabernae that is shops. Within the enclosure of the walls there are also farmhouses of past centuries, made with the beautiful local white stone but also horrible recently built houses, still inhabited, with the vineyard on the side or other quite unpresentable outbuildings. In short, Sepino is a place of extreme beauty, managed with an inconceivable lightness: all open, free, even to vandals.
On the other side totally free, you only pay for the parking coming from the state road; there are also exhibits set up in some buildings and a video room attendant who says: there would still be a lot to dig here, but there is no money. Touristy a bomb, but tell me if you've ever heard of it ... ..
By the way, the current town, which arose in medieval times, is called Altilia: if you look for Sepino on road signs, you also risk not finding it.
