The Civitalba plateau lies in the municipality of Sassoferrato (AN), in a commanding position above the upper valley of the Misa river, on the border with the territory of Arcevia. The site covers an area of around 14 hectares and occupies a strategic setting, not far from the location of the famous Battle of Sentinum (295 BC), along some of the main routes linking the Adriatic coast with the Apennine hinterland.
Civitalba has been known for over a century, thanks to the excavations carried out by Edoardo Brizio at the end of the nineteenth century, which brought to light imposing masonry structures and the celebrated terracotta pediment now held at the National Archaeological Museum of the Marche. On this basis, the site was long interpreted as an urban centre of the Republican Roman period. More recent research, beginning with the 2014 Summer School and the surveys of the Civitalba Survey Project (2023), has called this traditional reading into question, showing that the nineteenth-century documentary record is only partial. Rather than a single Roman town, Civitalba is now understood as a plateau marked by different forms of activity — cultic, settlement-related, productive — that succeeded one another over time.
The plateau has been the subject of non-invasive investigations since the early 2000s, when a geophysical survey promoted by the Comunità Montana Esino–Frasassi identified a high density of anomalies attributable to walls and roads. In 2014, as part of an Erasmus IP project directed by Federica Boschi (University of Bologna), the site underwent an integrated research programme combining aerial photography, drone-based surveys and several geophysical techniques (ARP, multichannel GPR, electromagnetic induction), which confirmed the presence of buildings and road axes buried just a few decimetres below the surface. In 2023, a group of students from the University of Bologna's School of Specialisation in Cultural Heritage (C. Balabani, S. Bottino, M. Cappello, M. Castoldi, I. Latini, G. Magnani, S. Ondei, F. Orilio, L. Tranchina) carried out new surface surveys, extending observation well beyond the area traditionally investigated.
This is the background to the Civitalba Project, promoted by the University of Bologna's Department of History, Cultures, Civilisation (DISCI) and the British School at Rome, in collaboration with the Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio for the provinces of Ancona and Pesaro Urbino and the Municipality of Sassoferrato. Over 24 months, the project will adopt a landscape-archaeology approach to study the entire plateau: topographic and drone-based photogrammetric surveys, LiDAR data, an extensive magnetometry survey across all 14 hectares, and targeted GPR investigations will feed into a shared GIS system, forming the basis of a new archaeological map of the site. The aim is to test the hypothesis of a unified urban settlement, to reconstruct the plateau's evolution from the pre-Roman period through the Roman era and beyond, and to place Civitalba within the wider territorial system of Sentinum. The research will be accompanied by public meetings and outreach initiatives, sharing the project's goals and results with the local community and laying the groundwork for the future protection and enhancement of the site.