The Roman city of Falerio Picenus stood at the site of the present-day hamlet of Piane di Falerone, in the province of Fermo, within Regio V Picenum, on an alluvial terrace on the left bank of the middle course of the Tenna river. Its position was strategic for ancient communications: Falerio lay at the intersection between the valley-floor road, which, along the Tenna valley, linked the Adriatic coast to the foothills and the Sibillini Mountains and also formed the main axis of the centuriation, and the Via Salaria Gallica, the inland route that ran from Asculum (Ascoli Piceno) to Urbs Salvia(Urbisaglia), connecting the Via Salaria to the Via Flaminia. The city's central role in the road network is confirmed by the discovery, in the surrounding area, of six milestones dating between 305 and 365 CE. Today the remains are protected and presented within the Archaeological Park of Falerio Picenus, which preserves the theatre, the amphitheatre (aligned with the theatre, on the opposite side of the city), two Roman cisterns (one of them monumental), the podium of the temple and several funerary monuments.
Located at the core of Picene territory, close to centres such as Belmonte Piceno, Grottazzolina, Montegiorgio and Fermo, for the pre-Roman period Falerio Picenus remains poorly documented, and only scattered finds suggest a protohistoric presence, perhaps connected with the "Papuni" population mentioned in some local inscriptions. The first certain record dates to 90 BC, when, at the foot of Mons Falarinus (the hill of present-day Falerone) the Romans led by Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo suffered an unexpected defeat at the hands of the Piceni during the Social War.
After that event, a centre of some importance arose at Falerio as early as the Triumviral age (around 49 BC), though little is known of it because it was soon overshadowed by the great monumental development promoted by Augustus. It was Augustus who settled here the veterans of the Battle of Actium (31 BC) and made Falerio a colony: the veterans were to be rewarded with land and with structures that would allow them to live as they had in Rome. The city was thus provided with paved (basolate) streets, an elegant theatre, a temple whose podium still emerges among the houses of the village, two imposing cisterns (one once faced with marble and statues), an amphitheatre and a monumental public sector, perhaps the forum, with a porticoed building, an apsidal building and a large square. The city's wealth is also attested by the imposing funerary monuments along the road towards Servigliano.
The theatre is today the most prominent structure and, at the same time, the hardest to interpret, having been excavated between the 18th and 19th centuries mainly for collecting purposes and then heavily altered by restorations and additions that have allowed its continued use for performances and events. Dated to the Augustan age on epigraphic grounds (among the inscriptions, a dedication to Gaius Caesar datable between 5 BC and AD 1), it is the smallest of the theatres so far known in Regio V: the orchestra measures 18.60 m, the cavea, opening towards the south-east, is 49.20 m long, with an overall estimated height of about 9.40 m. It is a "self-supporting" building, with the first two tiers of seating resting on an earthen fill (aggestus) held by radial walls, while the summa cavea, now lost, rested on a perimeter gallery on brick pillars with marble-clad half-columns: an architectural solution that, in a Picenum where most theatres leaned against natural slopes, is a rare exception. The first Augustan phase was followed by later interventions, including an embellishment of the Claudian age (AD 43), probably linked to the entrances, and modifications under Commodus and Valerian, while the completion of the decorative apparatus can be placed in the second half of the 2nd century AD. The capacity, long estimated at 1,600 spectators, is now reduced to about 1,100 seats.
Like many ancient theatres, the one at Falerio likely had a strong connection with the sacred sphere: some scholars have hypothesised the presence of a small temple in the upper part of the cavea, a hypothesis made plausible also by the discovery, in 1921, of architectural terracottas and votive offerings of the Republican age that suggest the existence of a cult area predating the theatre. The theatre also yielded fine statues found in the vomitoria during the 19th century, including a Ceres/Demeter, a Venus and a Jupiter, as well as a head of Augustus and two telamons bearing tragic masks, now partly dispersed among Italian and foreign museums, including the Louvre and the Vatican Museums.
Having flourished during the centuries of the pax Romana, Falerio Picenus was abandoned between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages: in an age of insecurity, marked by invasions and the Greek-Gothic War, the population sought refuge in more defensible positions, giving rise to the hilltop town of Falerone. Traces of the Lombard period also remain, such as the so-called Volveto stele, a reused Roman funerary slab whose inscription, dated to AD 770, mentions King Desiderius and contains the oldest known reference to the Duchy of Fermo.
The archaeology of Falerio has deep roots. In 1595 the discovery of a bronze tablet, the "rescript" by which the emperor Domitian (AD 82) sought to settle the dispute between the Falerienses and the people of Fermo over certain unassigned lands, aroused papal interest in the site: the tablet was donated to Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, who promoted the first diggings. The earliest documented investigations date to 1777, under Pius VI, when the theatre was explored, together with other Marche sites such as Cupra Maritima, Helvia Ricina and Urbs Salvia, in search of fine pieces for the Museo Pio Clementino, today part of the Vatican Museums. In 1836 the brothers Gaetano and Raffaele De Minicis, natives of Falerone, resumed excavations with more scientific aims, bringing the entire theatre structure to light and leaving a valuable excavation diary. Decisive for knowledge of the city was then, from the 1950s, the work of the local scholar Pompilio Bonvicini, honorary inspector of the Superintendency. After important synthetic studies and detailed work on the theatre, systematic research resumed in 2021.
The project to study and enhance Falerio Picenus began in 2020 and was formalised through an agreement between the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the provinces of Ascoli Piceno, Fermo and Macerata, the Municipality of Falerone and the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna, under the direction of Enrico Giorgi, Federica Grilli and Paolo Storchi. The aim is twofold: to improve overall knowledge of the city, which until now focused mainly on buildings, and to make its monuments understandable to the public, combining archaeological analysis, epigraphy, written sources and advanced documentation technologies. The approach combines the study of the monuments and the spaces between them with the analysis of satellite, aerial and drone imagery, geophysical surveys and, finally, stratigraphic excavation.
The resumption of research in 2021 began with a discovery: the identification by Paolo Storchi of crop marks in satellite and aerial images of the area north-west of the theatre, the sign of an entire buried public sector, until then unknown. Starting from this evidence, the archaeologists of the University of Bologna, under the supervision of the Superintendency, carried out non-invasive surveys with drone, ground-penetrating radar and magnetometer, which revealed the layout of the whole quarter. In 2023, under licence from the Ministry of Culture, the first excavation campaign took place, in two soundings: one revealed an apsidal structure identifiable as a Roman temple, with floors of prized marble slabs that also lined the walls; the other brought to light wall structures with several phases of use facing a paved (basolate) Roman road in excellent condition. These data, together with the recognition of pavements and a possible porticoed street at the crossing with another axis (perhaps the decumanus), place the investigation in the area of the forum.
A central strand of the project is the three-dimensional documentation of the theatre. In March 2022 the University of Bologna carried out a laser-scanner survey (Leica P30) producing a point cloud with sub-centimetre accuracy that became the reference base for the reconstruction. On this basis a virtual reconstruction of the building's original appearance was developed, with the modelling entrusted to Studio 111. The model is conceived not only as a "showcase" of the ancient appearance but as a genuine research tool: it made it possible, for example, to verify whether the individual architectural elements recovered could be coherently placed within the building and to test earlier hypotheses. It is also designed for public use directly on site, by scanning a QR code with a smartphone, in a spirit of "democratisation" of heritage: the inhabitants of Falerone can thus see reassembled what has largely been dispersed over the centuries.
Linked to the study of the theatre is an intervention carried out in 2022 on the occasion of the Superintendency's design of a new lighting system: the need to define beforehand the building's ancient rainwater collection and drainage system, never documented systematically, except in the 19th-century survey by the De Minicis brothers, gave rise to a focused investigation of the drainage system. Through ground-penetrating radar surveys (by Giuseppe Guarino) and a campaign of six stratigraphic soundings (carried out by Paul Blockley for the Ra.Ga company), it was possible to ascertain the position, course and construction techniques of three underground drainage lines, substantially matching what had been recorded in 1836: two symmetrical channels coming from the northern area (the sector of the probable forum), a channel originating in the orchestra and a small conduit collecting the water from the stage building. The channels, built of bricks, tiles and stone blocks, find a significant parallel in the drainage system of the theatre of Aquileia. Students of the Master's course in Archaeology of the University of Bologna also took part in the geophysical surveys.
The campaigns involve researchers, doctoral candidates and students of the University, together with students resident in the area, and rely on the support of the Municipality of Falerone. Besides fieldwork, the project looks to public engagement: the 3D reconstruction of the theatre accessible to visitors, a renewed educational route with new panels, and the re-display of the town's archaeological collection, whose museum had been closed following the 2016 earthquake. Results are shared publicly with the community, as in the presentation of September 2023. The work is carried out under licence from the Ministry of Culture and with the support of the Marche Region and the Municipality of Falerone.