Saepinum. A superb ancient city in Molise

Saepinum. A superb ancient city in Molise

Saepinum was an idea. A concept.
A metaphysical embellishment floating in the immanence in the form of stone and marble.
Its walls guard a paradigm; the essence also of painful ‘Italianness’, acquired on its outer shell through the age-old, cruel dance between winners and losers, between dominators and dominated.

Pentri, Romans, Lombards.
And battles, commerce, miseries and splendours. The whole sample case of humanity, after all. Admittedly summarized in what at sunset, in summer, appears as an ancient sleeping spaceship, moored in the plain of the Tammaro river under the severe shadow of the Matese.
Its chipped white columns seem to paint the ancestral sky, spraying a little orange on ancient turquoise.
The four Herculean access doors are open eyes for the ways, the Cardo and the Decumano, that geometric network of cobbled streets that explains better than a thousand treatises the Roman obsession with ratio, understood as the supreme form of virtue.
The semicircle of the theatre, surrounded by low, harmonic two-storey buildings, is a thought drawn with a compass. It is engineering applied to art.
The voices of the actors reciting Plautus and Afranius can still be heard. The applause of the audience, the cries of the children.
The palaces of the patricians and the shepherds' houses seem to want to speak, to scream their stories. Telling them to a world that must not forget them.
The future has ancient roots.
On the other hand, oblivion has no roots. It is negation, irreparable and complete loss.
Saepinum is an idea. But first of all, it is the battle cry of a brave and indomitable people. Pentri, they were called.
They inhabited these lands thousands of years ago. Now their descendants protect the lands and guard them jealously.
Not because they become a relic, but because they are another pearl to be discovered in the most precious necklace in the world: Italy. Her overbearing beauty is also here. In an ancient, superb Molise city a stone's throw from infinity.


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