Area archeologica di Pollentia (Percorso archeologico di Pollenzo)

Beneath the 19th-century borgo of Pollenzo lies Pollentia, once the largest Roman town between Alba Pompeia and Augusta Bagiennorum. An outdoor archaeological trail threads through the streets, where the horseshoe footprint of Piedmont's largest known amphitheatre survives in the layout of later buildings. Its urban setting preserves the outline of the ancient city.

Why it matters

Pollenzo is one of the rare places where you can read a Roman city without fences or a ticket office. Ancient Pollentia was the principal settlement between Alba Pompeia and Augusta Bagiennorum, and it stood near the site of the celebrated battle of 402 AD, when the Western Roman Empire fought for control of northern Italy. The Residenze Reali Sabaude circuit dedicates a specific trail to the site, noting that the modern street plan still follows Roman lines. Its standout feature is an elliptical Roman amphitheatre — described as the largest known in Piedmont — of which no masonry stands above ground, yet whose curved outline is preserved by buildings arranged along its edge. Finds from the excavations are displayed in Bra at the Museo Civico di Palazzo Traversa.

What to notice

The surviving traces appear not as freestanding ruins but in the shape of the place. The Roman remains and urban traces are legible in the curved outlines of later structures following the amphitheatre's elliptical plan. The official circuit text describes walking here as a journey among stones and memory, with the urbanisation of centuries layered directly on the Roman grid. Notice how the medieval rocca, the Savoy rebuild and the Roman substratum coexist in a few hundred metres — the cylindrical 46-metre tower belongs to the 1386 fortress, not to antiquity, and distinguishing the layers is the real pleasure of the visit.

Context and history

Pollentia's position on communication routes made it a strategic hub in Roman times and the largest town of its stretch of the Tanaro valley. Its name entered imperial history through the battle of 402 AD fought nearby, a turning point in the struggle between the Western Roman Empire and the Goths. The Middle Ages kept the place alive rather than illustrious: a Benedictine dependency in the orbit of Novalesa and Breme, later held by the nuns of Caramagna, then a county seat of the Visconti patrician Antonio Porro in the fourteenth century, before the marchesi di Romagnano renewed the castle in Mannerist taste in the later sixteenth. Systematic archaeology arrived late: a major excavation campaign began in 1958, coordinated by professor Edoardo Mosca, in search of evidence for the ancient city. The material recovered — much of it now kept at the Civic Museum of Palazzo Traversa in Bra — documents daily life in Pollentia across the Roman period. The medieval town that followed was battered by 12th- and 13th-century conflicts, and in 1832 Carlo Alberto's romantic rebuilding transformed the borgo yet again, so the archaeological trail crosses three distinct cities in one walk.