Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Campli

Inside a late-medieval Franciscan convent on Piazza San Francesco, Campli's state museum gives the Picene dead of Campovalano their voice: a dozen rooms of grave goods, reconstructions and bone studies that trace a thousand years of the middle Adriatic, from Bronze Age herders to aristocrats buried with gold and Celtic silver.

Why it matters

The museum is the state institution created to interpret the Campovalano necropolis, one of the key Italic burial grounds of central Italy. Inaugurated in the late 1980s inside a wing of the former monastery of San Francesco, it was designed from the start around the finds of the excavations begun in 1967, which the Ministry of Culture's page credits with redefining the contribution of Italic communities in prehistory. Beyond pottery and metalwork, the displays include a dedicated paleoanthropology space where skeletal remains are studied for sex, disease, trauma and age at death — a direct encounter with the ancient population of the Teramo hills. Its paleo-Sabellian inscription is among the oldest known in Abruzzo.

What to notice

The convent portico has mullioned windows and a Gothic portal that once led to the Chapter Hall; the museum’s dozen rooms The first section, "Campovalano prima degli italici", reconstructs Bronze Age daily life, including a child's tomb of the ninth century BC from the Coccioli area. From the eighth century BC, grave goods grow sumptuous: a reconstructed princely tomb, ceramics with a bucchero-like finish, bronze and iron milk-boilers and colanders used for cheese and ricotta, and weapons. The collection includes the pyxis from Tomb 100 with its engraved paleo-Sabellian inscription, the bronze Etruscan oinochoe from Tomb 1, the sword with its wooden scabbard from Tomb 69, and the glass-paste necklaces with human-mask pendants of Phoenician-Punic taste from Tombs 458 and 604. The women's section shows spindles, fibulae and a leather-and-bronze belt; male burials reliably place a razor on the chest; a display of a young aristocrat's gold-sheet bead necklace of Magna Graecian culture and silver bracelets of Celtic tradition.

Context and history

The convent housing the collection was founded towards the end of the thirteenth century, and the museum occupies the first floor of one wing, opened in 1988 expressly to display the Campovalano material (the municipal portal records its public opening in 1989). The underlying story is the necropolis itself: 621 tombs spanning roughly the twelfth century BC to the second century BC, excavated almost entirely between 1967 and 1998, whose study reshaped knowledge of the medio-adriatic or Picene cultural world and its exchanges with Etruscan and Greek civilisations. Campovalano also stands out as the only site in Abruzzo, according to the municipal portal, with evidence for the use of wooden carts resembling the later Roman biga, underscoring the rank of the local elite.