Vado Ligure carries in its name the Roman town that lies beneath it: Vada Sabatia, which grew up in the 2nd century BC around a military camp and later became a municipium of the empire. Much of what has resurfaced from that ground ended up here, in the Museo Civico of Villa Groppallo, opened in 1982 and rearranged in 1999. Two sections, one Roman and one medieval, inside a villa the town turned into the orderly store of its own antiquities.
What to see
The archaeological rooms gather the material recovered in the area of Vada Sabatia, and it helps to know what the place once was before looking at the cases: in 109 BC the via Aemilia Scauri linked Vado to Luni and to Rome, crossing the Apennines at the Cadibona pass, and the port appears in a letter from Brutus to Cicero, in the pages of Strabo, in Pliny the Elder as Portus Vadorum Sabatium and in the geographer Pomponius Mela. To the medieval section belongs a large collection of ancient coins datable between the 2nd and the 5th century.
The museum's second soul is contemporary art, and it is not an afterthought: these are works by local and international artists who passed through the Premio Vado, established in 1951. The upshot is that Villa Groppallo preserves not only finds but also a record of what an industrial town on the Riviera chose to reward over more than seventy years.
Visiting
The museum is municipal and its opening follows the town council's calendar: hours are limited and change with the season, so check days and times before setting out. Allow a little under an hour, which is enough for both sections. Bear in mind that Vado's other archaeological collection, the Civico Museo archeologico Cesare Queirolo, is almost never open to the public: if you want to see Vada Sabatia, Villa Groppallo is where you have to go.
Our editors' tip
On the way out, go and look at the war memorial Arturo Martini made in 1926, with its bronze figures of Sacrifice, Glory, History and Victory: it is the most important sculpture Vado Ligure owns and it stands in the open, visible at any hour. Look at it after the contemporary section of Villa Groppallo rather than before: it makes clearer where this town's attention to twentieth-century art comes from.