On a road map of the Roman Empire, the fourth-century Tabula Peutingeriana, Albisola appears under the name Alba Docilia. Docilia points to the Ligures Docilii, the tribe that held the belt between the Albisola coast and Sassello; Alba means a settlement, perhaps originally a height, and it is the same root that returns in Alba Pompeia, in Albium Ingaunum (Albenga) and in Albium Intemelium (Ventimiglia). The name survives locally: the town athletics club still carries it.
What to see
The remains lie in piazza Giulio II, opposite the exit of Albisola Superiore railway station, and belong to a large Roman complex dug in three campaigns. The first to uncover it was the priest G. B. Schiappapietra, in the nineteenth century, in the vegetable plots and orchards around the little church of San Pietro: it was his work that matched this field with the Alba Docilia of the ancient itineraries. Excavations in the 1950s, opened while the station was being built, and others in the 1970s produced the full perimeter.
Two parts can be told apart. The residential quarter has several rooms and a wide bath sector arranged around two peristyles; the working area is laid out instead around a large courtyard, and some rooms now covered by the station were used for making wine. The complex was at its height between the first and third centuries; the small church of San Pietro was later built over its ruins. In 2008, a short distance away, three Iron Age tombs came to light. The scale of the whole has led archaeologists to ask whether this was less a farming villa than a mansio, a posting station on the via Julia Augusta.
Visiting
The area is open-air, fenced and visible from the square, and it is run by the Italian ministry of culture, which also keeps its official website: check there for days and opening times before you set out. It is a minute on foot from the station, and the route among the walls is short and flat, workable even between two trains.
Our editors' tip
Come by train and the site explains itself: the railway runs literally over part of the villa, and the wine rooms stay under the tracks. That is the honest picture of the place, a Roman site that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries both rediscovered and cut in half; from there you also see why the road to Genoa and Rome ran exactly through here.