Area archeologica dell'antica Abellinum

Before Atripalda had its name, Abellinum stood on the Civita hill: a Samnite stronghold that became a Roman colony with walls, baths, a forum and a mansion fit for an imperial freedman. Its excavation area, reached from the town's main square, preserves the street-plan logic of a republican city.

Why it matters

Abellinum is the reason Atripalda exists. The Roman colony planted at the end of the second century BC on a plateau above the Sabato river administered the surrounding Irpinian highlands for centuries, and when the city failed its people simply moved downhill to the site of the modern town. What survives on the Civita plateau is unusually legible for a small municipal centre: a run of city wall at the entrance, a public quarter with thermal buildings and the forum, and a patrician house of about 2,500 square metres. The Ministry of Culture manages the ground together with the museum installed in the Dogana dei Grani, connecting the archaeological area with its material finds. The excavated remains preserve the outline of the colony's urban plan.

What to notice

At the northern entrance, the curtain of the city still rises in opus reticulatum, the Roman facing of small square blocks set in a regular diagonal net. The site includes two imposing circular towers and puts the walled extent at roughly 25 hectares. Inside the circuit, the eastern public zone holds the thermae and the forum, the political heart of the colony; temples fronted onto the forum, and a first-century marble altar dedicated to the emperor Tiberius that surfaced in these sanctuaries is now kept in the Museo Irpino in Avellino. The FAI entry identifies a bath room with calidarium known as the Torre degli Orefici and a section of the Roman aqueduct of the Serino within the walls.

The standout structure is the domus in the north-east sector: about 2,500 square metres laid out on the Hellenistic-Pompeian model familiar from Pompeii, traditionally assigned to Marcus Vipsanius Primigenius, a freedman connected to the family of Vipsanius Agrippa, the emperor Augustus's son-in-law. A cubiculum painted with vegetal motifs on Pompeian red and a peristile of columns testify to how prosperous this inland town became within a couple of generations of colonization.

Context and history

The plateau had been occupied by a fortified Samnite centre during the fourth and third centuries BC, remembered in the sources as the Oppidum Abellinatium. Roman conquest did not erase it: in the Gracchan era, at the close of the second century BC, Abellinum was refounded as a colony, gaining the walls, public buildings and housing blocks of a properly Roman town planted above the Sabato valley, on the route that ties inland Irpinia to Campania and Puglia. Decay came slowly. An earthquake in AD 346 opened a period of difficulty, the Greco-Gothic war of 535 to 555 destabilised the region, and with the Lombard advance in the sixth century the city was abandoned for good, its population relocating. The medieval commune that replaced it formed lower down, around the church of Sant'Ippolisto , leaving the plateau to farmers and memory. Excavation and study continue: the Ministry of Culture works with the University of Salerno's department of cultural heritage sciences on research, protection and public use, and the movable finds now fill the museum at the Dogana dei Grani . Local affection for the site is measurable too — in the FAI's 2018 I Luoghi del Cuore census it drew 565 votes, its best result by far.