Teatro Romano and Museo Archeologico, Spoleto

The Teatro Romano of Spoleto is a 1st-century-AD theatre tucked against the lower slopes of the old town near Piazza della Libertà, its curved tiers of seating excavated and restored over the past century so that it once again hosts open-air performances during the summer festival season. Although much of the upper seating was lost when later buildings, including the convent of Sant'Agata, rose over the site, the orchestra, the lower cavea and the stage area survive, and the great semicircular sweep of the auditorium is easy to read. Set immediately beside it, in the former convent, is the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, whose galleries display the Roman and pre-Roman archaeology of Spoleto and the surrounding valley: funerary stelae, portrait busts, inscriptions, bronzes and everyday objects recovered from the area. The museum's most celebrated piece is the Lex Spoletina, a pair of inscribed stone cippi from the 3rd century BC forbidding, on pain of a fine, the cutting of wood in a sacred grove, one of the earliest legal texts of the region. A combined visit to the theatre and museum usually takes around an hour, making it an easy and rewarding stop in the lower historic centre before climbing to the cathedral and the Rocca. The site is quietest in the morning, and admission is modest. The theatre still comes alive each summer with concerts and dance as part of the Festival dei Due Mondi, when the ancient stage is used much as it was two thousand years ago, in the heart of Spoleto in central Umbria.