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In Sardinia, in the north west of the island, near Sassari in the locality of La Crucca, there is the first and only existing reconstruction in Italy of a 2000-year-old Roman fortress from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD: a Roman Castrum. Thanks to the Castrum Romano Association, born out of a passion for ancient Rome, it is possible to get a clear idea of what a Roman fort might have looked like and to discover what life was like for the Roman soldiers who lived there.
Sardinia became Roman in 238 BC, but especially after the victorious battle of 215 BC, of the legions of Titus Manlius Torquatus against the Sardinians of Hampsicora allied with the Carthaginian troops led by the commander Asdrubal the bald, Rome had almost total control of the island.
For about another 100 years, however, during the Roman Republic, it was the scene of minor clashes and military actions against the guerrilla warfare of the island's innermost populations.
Several areas of the island were garrisoned by military camps or small posts to control the territory. Some of these became permanent fortifications, which may have become villages that still exist today, but of the rest of the forts, most being built of wood, there is unfortunately no trace left.
During imperial Rome, Sardinia was almost completely pacified, but in the period from 6 to 14 A.D., there were again violent uprisings and the island's hottest and most inland centres were again remilitarised.
The Roman Castrum La Crucca is reconstructed according to that period, a small fortification garrisoned by 32 or 48 men that must have been located perhaps in the wooded mountains of central Sardinia. Similar outposts, probably isolated, might still retain traces in some inaccessible area that only the shepherds of those areas might have known about.
The Roman army, like its structures and logistics, was rather standardised. One could find the same catapult in Morocco as in Scotland, the same grindstone for grinding grain in present-day Iraq and in Spain; therefore also the castrum was almost the same in Germany as in Sardinia. For this reason, the historical veracity of the reconstruction of Castrum La Crucca can be confirmed as reliable evidence of a small fortification in Sardinia.
Massimiliano Schirru is the co-founder, together with his wife Sabina, of the Castrum Romano Association of Sassari, which is responsible for the reconstruction of the Roman Castrum of La Crucca and which operates in the field of historical re-enactment and the historical, cultural, recreational and leisure activities that are organised annually in the park surrounding the Roman fort of La Crucca.
Visit the Park of the Roman Castrum of La Crucca, you too can spend a different day in the open air and perhaps meet the legionaries of the Cohors I Nurritanorum, a Sardinian unit made up of Sardinian soldiers...