The road through Larino had a name and a maintenance officer: it was called the Traiana Frentana, and we know the name from the tombstone of one Marco Blavio, listed among the curatores of the route linking Ancona to Brindisi. A funerary inscription, in short, tells us what people called the artery that made the Roman town rich.
Larinum stood on the inland hills at around 400 m, some 26 km from the Adriatic, above the lower course of the Biferno. It was no ordinary place: the Piana San Leonardo gave fertile soil that was easy to work, clay and limestone fed the kilns, and river stone from the Cigno and the Biferno supplied building material. By the third century BC the town was already rich and populous, well before the Punic Wars, and it outweighed its neighbours in trade.
Visiting
Larinum is today an archaeological area in the province of Campobasso, and admission is free. It is a site you read by walking it: the commanding position over the valley floor explains on its own why goods and people stopped here. Larino was a junction, not a terminus. Inland, the Biferno valley led to Bovianum, now Bojano; joining the Celano-Foggia drove road took you to Luceria, that is Lucera, in northern Daunia; from the north the coast road mentioned by Livy came down the Adriatic from Histonium, today's Vasto.
Our editors' tip
Before you climb to the site, look at the hills around it, because Larino's story begins long before the Romans. In 1974 a University of Sheffield mission led by Graeme Barker began surveying the Biferno valley and identified about 120 ancient settlements, from the Neolithic to the first century BC. The largest sits on Monte Maulo, a plateau at about 350 m below Larino, explored in 1978: it yielded 146 charred seeds, mostly barley, wheat and pulses, bones of animals butchered on the spot, and thousands of pottery fragments. Radiocarbon dates run in an Oxford laboratory point to the second half of the fifth millennium BC. Farmers and herders were already here.