Saepinum: free right now, €10 in normal times

Entry to the Roman town of Altilia-Saepinum has been free since March 1, 2026 because work is under way; the ordinary price is €10 full and €2 reduced.

Free, and dated, and temporary

Since March 1, 2026 the site has admitted visitors at no charge while work is carried out. That is a decision by the operator, the Parco archeologico di Sepino, and it has no announced end.

The ordinary tariff behind it is €10 full and €2 for ages 18 to 25, with under-18s free and an annual card at €20. Prices are in euros.

Check parcosepino.it before you set off. Free entry is by definition provisional, and this page carries a date on it for exactly that reason.

8:15 am to 7:15 pm, seven days

The gates are open 8:15 am to 7:15 pm every day of the week, with last entry 30 minutes before closing (08:15 to 19:15 on Italian signs).

An eleven-hour day with no weekly closure is unusual for an Italian archaeological site. It is also the practical answer to Molise's transport problem: if you have to reach Sepino by road, you are not fighting a 1:30 pm shutdown.

The address is C.da Altilia 1, SP82, 86017¹ Sepino, in the province of Campobasso.

A Roman town, from 293 BC

Rome took this area in 293¹ BC, during the third Samnite war, and the town that followed is the one you walk through: forum, basilica, theater, walls and towers, and 4 gates, among them Porta Bojano and Porta Terravecchia.

The scale is domestic rather than imperial, which is the point. This is a provincial Roman town with its street plan intact and farm buildings still standing inside the walls.

A droving road runs through it

The Pescasseroli to Candela tratturo, 1 of the great grass roads of transhumance, crosses the archaeological area itself.

That crossing is why the town exists. Saepinum was founded where the tratturo met the road coming down from the Matese massif towards the plain of the Tammaro, and the two axes set the shape of the streets.

The lengths of the Pescasseroli to Candela and Celano to Foggia tratturi are not verified on an official source, so no kilometer figure appears here.

Transhumance: UNESCO 2019, extended 2023

Transhumance went onto the UNESCO representative list of intangible cultural heritage in 2019, on a joint nomination by Italy, Austria and Greece, and was extended in 2023 to 10 states.

The extended file, reference 01964³ at session 18.COM, covers Albania, Andorra, Austria, Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Romania and Spain. It recognizes both the horizontal form, across lowlands, and the vertical form of mountain areas.

Worth being straight about: none of the official pages names Molise or counts its tratturi, so the common claim that the region holds the densest surviving network is not sourced.

Two official pages, two different prices

2 government sources disagree on the price here: cultura.gov.it lists €10, while the regional museums directorate for Molise lists entry as free.

The contradiction resolves at the operator's own site, which explains that free entry is temporary, granted from March 1, 2026 because of the works, and prints the ordinary €10 and €2 tariff alongside it.

That is how a discrepancy gets fixed: not by picking the friendlier number, but by finding the page that explains both. For the region, see Molise.

↑ Contents