In via Anelli, from number 90 to the end of the road at the intersection with via Sant’Antonio, the wall at the base of the modest houses that overlook it is free of plaster and reveals a curious alternation of bricks and squared stones laid in a rhomboidal.
It is a fragment of about 20 meters of Roman wall which forms the basis of all the blocks of flats in this area of Vasto, where we find the road system of the Roman city.
Also here, we also find the foundations of the houses that were built on the previous insulae of the ancient Histonium, the blocks of flats in which the people lived within the city walls.
It is not possible to exactly date the walls we see. We do not know whether they date back to the foundation of the city in the first century AD, or whether they are later, as the technique used which sees the alternation of layers of brick with layers of squared stone suggests.
This technique, called Opus Mixtum, was born from the union of the Opus testaceum, in which exclusively clay bricks were used, with the Opus Reticolatum, in which the masonry was composed of squared stones, bonded with mortar, and arranged with the characteristic diamond-shaped installation.
If we look up and look at the perspective of the road, we can imagine that in Roman times it must not have been so different from how it appears today. The width of the street, one of the city’s minor decumani, and the height of the buildings must have been similar to the current ones.
Via Anelli, in fact, is one of the streets that have preserved the Roman layout almost to perfection. Divided in two by the Cardo Maximus, the current Corso Palizzi, together with the other decumani, formed the road structure within which the inhabited blocks were arranged by row.
This structure is the one typical of the northernmost part of the Roman city, the one that ends with the Decumanus Maximus, the current Corso Dante Alighieri.
In the southernmost part of the imperial era city, the street structure changes, and the layout of the blocks, located between several minor cardoons, is called per strigas.
Unfortunately, due to the succession of invasions following the fall of the Roman Empire, and the reuse of the structures in several historical eras, today it is difficult to get a precise idea of what the city of Histonium must have been like.
This corner, curiously preserved in its original proportions, helps us at least to have a suggestion of how it must have appeared to those who arrived there just under two thousand years ago.
