Long standing archaeological investigations in a valley of central Adriatic Italy allowed a team of Ghent University, during the past two decades, to apply systematic prospections and monitoring of more than a hundred Roman rural sites. The research presented here concerns a series of rural sites where the integration of data from surface artefact scatters, with results from geophysical prospections and remote sensing, contributes to the understanding of architectural aspects and the typology of Roman villas in this part of ancient Picenum.