Resti dell'Anfiteatro Romano

In 1987, three metres below road level, excavations exposed the curving perimeter of a Roman amphitheatre built in the second half of the first century AD. The surviving walls are preserved beneath the modern street level.

Why it matters

The elliptical structure is estimated at roughly 104 by 78 metres, sized for the town of Hasta, the Roman settlement on the left bank of the Tanaro from which Asti descends. What makes the site remarkable is its survival: roughly twenty metres of perimeter wall, 180 centimetres thick, and two spine walls 80 centimetres thick running toward the arena. The masonry combines river pebbles and mortar with double courses of large sesquipedale bricks laid horizontally at regular intervals.

What to notice

The surviving perimeter wall includes regular horizontal brick bands in its stone-and-mortar fabric. Two thinner spine walls run toward the arena and formed part of the substructure that supported the seating. The remains lie about three metres below the modern street level.

Context and history

Hasta (or Hasta Pompeia) was planted during Rome's expansion into Cisalpine Gaul in the second century BC, and by the imperial period it merited the standard apparatus of a Roman town — baths, forum, paved streets, houses with mosaics, and an amphitheatre on its north-eastern edge, built in the second half of the first century AD. The structure — an elliptical building for public spectacles — stood in the immediate outskirts of the Roman settlement, where the great games of the empire served a modest provincial town. The city's medieval rebirth as free commune Asti grew directly on top of this grid, which is why Roman structures keep emerging during construction work in the centre. The amphitheatre's rediscovery in 1987 during construction in the area was one of the most significant finds of modern Asti archaeology, because it fixed the location and dimensions of a monument previously known only from scattered references and finds.