Asculum, Ascoli Piceno
city · Marche, Italy
2 places to see, the best preserved and best known first.
Photo: MarkusMark · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons
bridge · Marche
The bridge is one round arch of squared travertine blocks with a span of 22.20 m, standing 25 m high to the roadway, which is 62 m long and 6.50 m wide (it.wikipedia; de.wikipedia and the city's tourism site give the same span and length).
Photo: Sibilla.io at Italian Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons
gate · Marche
The gate is two arches carried on three massive travertine piers, built of large squared blocks laid without mortar.
The showpiece is the Ponte di Solestà, an Augustan bridge that crosses the Tronto in a single arch of travertine blocks with a span of about 22 m; it stands 25 m high to the roadway, which is 62 m long. It still links the centre with the Porta Cappuccina quarter and is regarded as one of the most representative Roman bridges, having kept its construction features intact, though in the 1930s its core was emptied and a concrete bridge, visible nowhere, cast inside it (it.wikipedia). A stair in the left abutment leads into the bridge, up along the arch to the keystone and over a walkway between the Roman walls (FAI); no source found says when that interior is open. At the town end of the bridge stands Porta Solestà, a gate built in 1230, probably from the stones of an earlier Roman one (it.wikipedia).
Porta Romana, also called Porta Gemina, between the slope of the Annunziata hill and the Tronto, is a Roman gate of the 1st century BC with two arches on three travertine piers, 6.75 m high; the grooves for its portcullises are still visible inside the arches. The Via Salaria entered the town through it (it.wikipedia). Against the same slope are the excavated remains of the theatre, built in the 1st century BC, with 32 radial walls of the seating visible and the stage building mostly under the church of Santa Croce (it.wikipedia). On the east flank of the same hill, the Grotte dell’Annunziata are rows of barrel-vaulted chambers built against the rock, rising 18 m from the ancient ground level; current studies date them to the 2nd-1st century BC and take them for the substructure of a large temple, plausibly the Capitolium (it.wikipedia). On the east side, the two-arched Ponte di Cecco crosses the Castellano gorge 25 m above the water; blown up in 1944, it was rebuilt in the 1960s from its own stones recovered from the stream (it.wikipedia).
Finds from the town are in the Archaeological Museum on Piazza Arringo, whose ground floor holds the remains of Roman Asculum, from inscribed travertine monuments to a mosaic with a two-faced mask at its centre (the operator).
Yes, if you like your Roman remains mixed into a living town. Nothing here is a single great site you pay to enter: everything lies within about a kilometre of Piazza del Popolo, taking in a Roman bridge that is still a working road bridge after two thousand years, a second bridge in a green ravine, a Roman gate and a hillside theatre. Anyone who wants a large excavated city should go elsewhere; anyone spending a day in Ascoli gets a lot of Rome for free. Budget for the museum, and do not count on getting inside the theatre without arranging it first.
All the stops are within about a kilometre of Piazza del Popolo: the Grotte dell’Annunziata about 0.4 km, the Ponte di Solestà and its gate about 0.5 km, the theatre 0.6 km, Porta Romana 0.7 km and the Ponte di Cecco 0.9 km (straight-line distances). The square itself is pedestrian; paid car parks are mapped about 200 m from the square, and buses stop on Via Trieste nearby (OpenStreetMap).
The gates and bridges are in the street and free. The Archaeological Museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 08.30 to 19.30 and closed on Mondays; a ticket is €4, €2 for EU citizens aged 18 to 25, and free for EU citizens under 18 (the operator, read 19 October 2026). The city’s tourism site lists the theatre as open on request only, and its page still carries a notice of a temporary closure, so contact it before travelling for the theatre.
Before you go
Hours and prices checked 19 October 2026 on the operator's own site. Confirm before travelling.
Asculum was the principal town of the Piceni (Pleiades). Contact with Rome came through trade along what became the Via Salaria, the route between the Tyrrhenian and the Adriatic; after its defeat by Rome in 268 BC it became an allied city, a civitas foederata. In 90 BC it was the first city to rise against Rome, the revolt that began the Social War; Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo took and sacked it in 89 BC, and it became a Roman municipium. Under Augustus, who made Picenum the fifth region of Italy, the town prospered and gained temples, theatres, houses, bridges and fortifications (it.wikipedia).
The theatre fell out of use after the Lombard sack of the town in 578 and was then quarried for stone and burnt for lime, as kilns found nearby show, before landslides buried it; it was excavated in 1932, 1951 and 1959 and restored for summer performances in 2010 (it.wikipedia). Porta Romana was repaired after Frederick II’s army damaged the town, gaining a second set of medieval arches in front of the Roman ones, and was later opened up in full again. The Ponte di Cecco was long taken for medieval work until the architect and archaeologist Giambattista Carducci recognised it as Roman, of the republican period (it.wikipedia).
Photo: Franco TamTam · Public domain · Commons
24 km · city · Abruzzo
The theatre and the amphitheatre stand side by side next to the cathedral, in what was the western quarter of the Roman town; a theatre and an amphitheatre a few metres apart is described as almost unique (it.wikipedia).
Photo: Franco TamTam · Public domain · Commons
Photo: Franco TamTam · Public domain · Commons
Straight-line distances.
Every fact on this page comes from the records below, each used under the licence noted.
| Source | Licence |
|---|---|
| Pleiades 413036 | CC BY |
| Wikidata Q105704154 | CC0 |
| Vici.org 1677 | CC BY-SA (text), CC0 (metadata) |
| Wikipedia (it) — Asculum | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Wikipedia (it) — Porta Romana (Ascoli Piceno) | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Wikipedia (it) — Porta Solestà | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Wikipedia (it) — Ponte romano di Solestà | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Wikipedia (it) — Ponte di Cecco | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Wikipedia (it) — Teatro romano di Ascoli Piceno | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Wikipedia (it) — Grotte dell'Annunziata | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Ascoli Piceno — hours and tickets (Direzione regionale Musei nazionali Marche) | licence not recorded |
| Visit Ascoli (Comune di Ascoli Piceno) — the Roman theatre | licence not recorded |
| FAI, I Luoghi del Cuore — Ponte romano di Porta Solestà | licence not recorded |
