Sarsina

Is it worth the trip?

For the museum, yes, if you are in Romagna or driving the Savio valley. The Ministry of Culture, which runs it, calls it one of the most important museums in northern Italy and the mausoleum of Rufus one of the best preserved Roman tombs of its kind in Cisalpine Italy. Plan around its hours, which are mornings from Tuesday to Thursday and afternoons from Friday to Sunday. Without the museum, Sarsina is not worth a detour for its ruins alone: what remains in place is a fragment of forum paving and one rebuilt tomb in a garden, seen in a short walk round the old centre.

Getting there

Sarsina lies in the valley of the Savio, 32 km from Cesena and 50 km from Forlì (it.wikipedia). Two car parks are mapped about 45 m from the forum, one of them free for two hours, and a paid underground car park lies about 170 m away; bus stops are mapped about 160 m from the forum (OpenStreetMap). The museum is at Via Cesio Sabino 39, a short walk from the square.

The museum is open Tuesday to Thursday 09.00–14.00 and Friday to Sunday 13.30–18.30, with the ticket office closing half an hour earlier; it is closed on Mondays, 1 January and 25 December. A ticket is €7, €2 for EU citizens aged 18 to 24, and free under 18. Entry is free for everyone on the first Sunday of each month and on several dates in the year, among them 28 August, the feast of the town’s patron saint (the Ministry of Culture, read 23 October 2026; check before travelling, since hours and prices change). The forum remains are in a public area (the Ministry of Culture) and cost nothing.

History

Sassina was first settled by Umbrians who reached the Savio valley in the 4th century BC; the earliest traces of the town, beside today’s Piazza Plauto, are modest timber buildings with small workshops (it.wikipedia). Published dates for the Roman conquest differ: the Wikipedia articles give 266 BC and a triumph by the consuls of that year, Pleiades a capture by Cornelius Scipio in 271 BC. Either way the town became an allied city that paid tribute and supplied soldiers, and Plautus was born there a few years later (it.wikipedia; Pleiades). In 225 BC the Umbrians and the Sassinates were listed together as providing 20,000 men to Rome (en.wikipedia).

In the middle decades of the 1st century BC Sassina became a Roman municipium and was replanned, with new buildings and a town wall; under Augustus it was placed in Regio VI, Umbria (it.wikipedia). The town grew until the 3rd century AD on woodland and pasture and on trade with the port of Ravenna. Its tombstones name guilds of craftsmen, cloth makers, carpenters and muleteers (it.wikipedia), and it supplied recruits to the Praetorian Guard (en.wikipedia). Near the end of the 1st century Caesius Sabinus, as aedile, adorned the town with buildings of stone and marble; Via Cesio Sabino, the street of the museum, is named after him (it.wikipedia).

Towards the end of the 3rd century the town was devastated, perhaps by barbarian raiders, and fire marks survive on the floors of some houses. Further raids, perhaps by the Visigoths and the Heruli, followed between 409 and 470. By tradition its first bishop, Vicinius, was appointed between the 3rd and 4th centuries (it.wikipedia). The museum was founded in 1890 as a town collection, grew between 1927 and 1939 with the finds of the Roman cemetery discovered at Pian di Bezzo, and was bought by the state in 1957 (it.wikipedia; the Ministry of Culture).