Molise historical timeline

Deep prehistory

La Pineta, on the edge of Isernia, is among the oldest evidence of human presence in Europe: a site where stone tools and the butchered bones of bison, elephant and rhinoceros were left around 600,000-700,000 years ago, preserved under volcanic deposits. It was found in 1979 during roadworks, and a museum was built over it.

The Samnites

The Samnites were a confederation of Oscan-speaking mountain peoples, and Rome's most serious Italian opponent. Three Samnite Wars ran from 343 to 290 BC. At the Caudine Forks in 321 BC a Roman army was trapped in a defile and forced to surrender and pass under a yoke — the most humiliating defeat in the republic's early history.

Rome won in the end and broke the confederation, but Samnite sanctuaries survive, and Pietrabbondante — a theatre and temple complex on a high ridge — is the best of them anywhere.

Rome and after

Under Rome the region was a quiet agricultural province, and the tratturi were formalised as the infrastructure of large-scale sheep farming — an economy that would define the area for the next two millennia. Saepinum was a small town on one of them, and survives almost intact precisely because nothing important ever happened to it afterwards.

The Lombard Duchy of Benevento absorbed the area, then the Normans, then the Kingdom of Naples. Throughout, Molise was administered from somewhere else. The name comes from the de Moulins, a Norman family who held land here.

Sheep, emigration and separation

Transhumance was the economy. Naples formalised it in 1447 with the Dogana della Mena delle Pecore, a customs body at Foggia that taxed every flock using the tratturi, and that system ran until the 19th century.

When it collapsed, so did the region's livelihood. From the 1880s Molisani emigrated in enormous numbers to the Americas, and later to northern Europe and northern Italy — proportionally among the heaviest emigrations from anywhere in Italy. The population has never recovered.

Molise was administered jointly with Abruzzo as "Abruzzi e Molise" until 1963, when it was separated and became Italy's twentieth region, the last created.

What is visible now

The Palaeolithic site at Isernia, Samnite walls and the Pietrabbondante sanctuary, Saepinum standing in a field, the tratturi as green corridors, and half-empty villages that tell the emigration story without needing a museum.