Ascoli Piceno

Where it is

Ascoli Piceno lies in the southern Marche, in the heart of ancient Picenum, in a strategic position along the valley of the Tronto river. Ancient Asculum was a crucial node in the Roman road network: it was crossed by the Via Salaria which, in its Augustan arrangement, ran through the town's historic centre, connecting Picenum with Rome and the Tyrrhenian area. From this same district the Via Salaria Gallica branches off northwards, towards Fermo. The surrounding territory, crossed by the Tronto and its tributaries, still preserves numerous remains of Roman road engineering (bridges, substructures and retaining walls) along the route of the consular road, as far as the Apennine villages at the foot of the Sibillini Mountains.

A brief history of the Roman city

Asculum was the civitas caput gentis of the Piceni, that is, the chief centre of the Picene people, as Florus records (I, 14, 2). After a phase as a federated city, it became a Roman colony — the colonia Piceni nobilissima of the Plinian tradition (Naturalis Historia III, 111) — and acquired a monumental urban layout whose form research is now reconstructing, starting from the location of the forum. Significant remains of the ancient city survive, often incorporated into the later fabric: a Corinthian temple subsequently enclosed within the Romanesque church of San Gregorio Magno, the imposing late-Republican substructures of the Colle dell'Annunziata, and a poliadic sanctuary, whose ceramic finds have shed new light on the city's origins and on the complex phenomenon of the Latin acculturation of the inhabitants of Picenum.

Ascoli is, in fact, a city of long continuous life, a multi-layered palimpsest in which the Roman, medieval and modern phases overlap within the same space. This is especially evident in the area of present-day Piazza del Popolo, where investigations have identified the buried remains of medieval buildings demolished in several phases, up to the enlargement of the square with the construction of the Convento di San Francesco, while deeper structures, at the same level as the Roman remains preserved beneath the Palazzo dei Capitani, are probably to be referred to the layout of the Roman colony. A similar stratification characterises the medieval Platea Inferior, today Piazza Ventidio Basso.

The activities of the University of Bologna

The interest of the University of Bologna's archaeologists in the central Adriatic area, and in the territory of the Marche in particular, has deep roots: it draws on a solid tradition of studies that goes back to Nereo Alfieri, discoverer of Spina and founder of the Bolognese school of Landscape Archaeology, to which the University owes long-standing projects such as those of Colombarone, near Pesaro, and of the Roman municipium of Suasa, in the hinterland of Senigallia. Within the same strand, more recently, fall the studies on the territory and the urban centre of Ascoli Piceno. These form part of a unified design that interweaves research, heritage protection and enhancement, made possible by the collaboration between the Superintendency, the University and the bodies responsible for the governance of the territory, with the active involvement of the archaeologists working in the area and of local cultural associations, in the conviction that the results of research should first of all be given back to those who continue to inhabit these places. The work is organised into three complementary strands, devoted respectively to the territory, to ancient roads, and to urban archaeology.

The first strand is the Archaeological Map of the Provinces of Ascoli Piceno and Fermo, a three-year programme launched in 2017 and born from an insight of the Superintendency, which made the most of the potential offered by the legislation on preventive archaeology, with the support of the water utility CIIP. The project provides for the mapping, on a shared geographic database and according to the most up-to-date methodological criteria, of all the known archaeological evidence in the municipalities of the two provinces; the work is already complete for much of the Ascoli area. Alongside the cartographic, bibliographic and archival study are sample surface surveys, in the district of Ascoli and, more recently, in the area bordering Fermo along the Via Salaria Gallica, together with aerial-photographic and geognostic investigations and stratigraphic checks carried out in collaboration with the British School at Rome. The ultimate goal is to arrive at a Map of Archaeological Potential, a tool capable of guiding both research and preventive protection.

The second strand is the Map of the Ancient Salaria, completed in 2015 in view of an infrastructural redevelopment project promoted by Anas. After the archival study, the survey followed the route of the consular road in the Tronto valley, with new surveys of the surviving structures carried out using photogrammetry, laser scanning and GPS positioning, useful both for the critical reading of the remains according to the methods of the archaeology of architecture and for identifying conservation and structural risks. Bridges, substructures and retaining walls were documented, significant reuses of inscriptions and milestones were catalogued (such as the Milestone of Trisungo or those of the church of San Pietro d'Arli), and entire stretches now lost were mapped with GPS tracks, for example through the Bosco di Castagne Coperte, above Quintodecimo. The survey also led to new discoveries, such as  the abutments of ancient wooden bridges near Trisungo, the remains of bricks from Roman bath complexes near San Salvatore, below Arquata del Tronto, where the post station of Surpicanum known from the Tabula Peutingeriana can be located, and, above all, it recorded the state of these constructions before the damage caused by the Sibillini Mountains earthquake, providing a valuable basis for future projects of structural safeguarding and enhancement, such as the creation of tourist routes or cycle paths along the "fossil" stretches of the Salaria.

The third strand is the urban archaeology project at Ascoli Piceno, launched in 2012 under an urban-scale agreement and carried out in collaboration with the Municipality, in particular with the Department of Town Planning and Territorial Planning, with the aim of building a shared tool for the governance of changes to the inhabited space. Alongside the analysis of archives and historical land registers, a systematic georadar mapping of the city's main open spaces was carried out thanks to a series of summer field schools, giving priority to the areas earmarked for urgent redevelopment works, such as Piazza Ventidio Basso: in this way archaeology became a resource already at the planning stage, rather than an obstacle. The critical reading of the anomalies, cross-referenced with the identification of modern infrastructure and of demolished historic buildings documented in the historical land registers, made it possible to guide the stratigraphic soundings carried out by professionals and to feed a shared database, in a synergy between research and protection. The integration of the data from the municipal boreholes made it possible to reconstruct the course of the ancient palaeosol, while the laser-scanner surveys and the reading of the elevations of the city's great architectural palimpsests, such as the Corinthian temple of San Gregorio Magno or the substructures of the Annunziata, also proved valuable for assessing earthquake damage. Finally, the integrated study of the geophysical surveys of Piazza del Popolo, conducted together with the archival sources, the period views and the review of the Palazzo dei Capitani complex, has renewed the hypotheses on the form of the ancient city and on the location of the forum.