Serious excavation of the archaeological remains of Ostia really began only in the early years of the present century. Spasmodic work upon the site was, it is true, undertaken during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the earliest excavators, De Norogna, Volpato, La Piccola, Hamilton and Fagan, were little more than treasure-hunters, more intent upon gaining possession of some artistic masterpiece than upon elucidating the problems of the past. Even the distinguished archaeologists of the nineteenth century, Visconti, Lanciani and Gatti, worked at Ostia only spasmodically, and often failed to publish adequate accounts of their discoveries. Nor were serious attempts made to protect from the ravages ofrainand frost the buildings unearthed.

Polibio è giustamente considerato come la fonte più importante per la comprensione dell'Imperialismo Romano nel II secolo a.C. ma la sua pittura risalente all'impero romano è molto spesso ignorata. La sua opinione tanto sull'estensione che sulla natura del dominio romano è fondamentalmente diversa da quella avuta dai Romani nel I secolo a.C.; e deve essere stata diversa da quella dei senatori nel II secolo, almeno in assenza delle idee chiave, come imperium e provincia. Egli vede Roma in termini applicabili a una monarchia ellenistica, opinione condivisa dai suoi contemporanei in Grecia, ma non a Roma.

The first quarter of the fifteenth century, which saw, for the first time, the emergence of Florence as a seapower with its own fleets and ports, was particularly important in the history of the city. The conquest of Pisa in 1406, the purchase of Leghorn and Porto Pisano in 1421, and the launching and despatch of the first communal galleys in 1422, were all events that were acclaimed in Florence as jointly constituting the achievement of a cherished wish, and the birth of a new era of prosperity. Prior to this the Florentines had had to rely on the benevolence of the Pisans and the Sienese for their western outlets to the sea, and on foreign or on hired shipping for the carriage of their trade. Now they planned to launch a galley system comparable to that of the Venetians, to link up trading colonies throughout the Mediterranean, and to establish a reliable vehicle for exploiting the markets of Northern Europe and for bringing in the supplies of English wool so valuable to the Florentine woollen industry.

An article in volume xl of these Papers recorded something of the programme of work which is being undertaken by the British School at Rome, in collaboration with the Italian authorities, on the site of the earthquake-shattered medieval town of Tuscania, in the province of Viterbo some 90 kilometres north-west of Rome. In this article David Whitehouse has given a preliminary sketch of the magnificent series of medieval and post-medieval pottery, the recovery and evaluation of which constitutes one of the most challenging aspects of the situation created by the earthquake. The bulk of this pottery comes from pits which, having outlived their original function as storage pits, reservoirs or cess-pits, were backfilled with material which, though containing a few earlier pieces (as is almost inevitable on an urban site), was in almost all cases broadly homogeneous. In archaeological terms these are closed groups affording a remarkably clear terminus post quem non for the contents of each pit.

Much of the pottery from these pits is most attractive work, finding a ready market, and in a country where free enterprise flourishes and the State archaeological authorities are grossly understaffed, it is often a matter of hours between the discovery of a fresh pit and the disappearance of its finer contents. For this reason alone a high priority had from the start to be given to helping the staff of the Superintendency in the race to recover as many intact or near-intact groups as possible. On two occasions, in mid-winter 1972–73 and again later in 1973, groups of pits were cleared, on the first occasion by Peter Donaldson, John Morrish and Laura Glashan, and on the second by Mr. and Mrs. Gaylord, in both cases with the invaluable help of Sig. Enzo Marziale. Since then Sig. Marziale has himself recovered a number of other pits of which the lower parts were undisturbed, of which enough remained of the contents to justify their treatment as significant archaeological groups. Almost all of these pits contained, in addition to pottery, a wide range of other domestic throw-outs, notably broken glass vessels, small metalwork objects and organic refuse.

The decade between 1250 and 1260 is for a variety of reasons, mainly political and financial, a bleak period in Roman art. The tomb of cardinal Fieschi and some other Cosmatesque work survives in S. Lorenzo fuori le mura, the former in a gravely damaged state. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss a monument of greater significance for Roman mediaeval art than either of these. The monument is precisely dated and significant portions of it survive. Ignorance of its original aspect has denied it all but the most summary attention in even the most specialized monographs.

Before the reconstructions of the eighteenth century, two tabernacles stood in the apse of S. Maria Maggiore. Both were probably dismantled during Ferdinando Fuga's remodelling of the nave of the basilica. Only that to the right of the apse, generally termed the Tabernacolo delle Reliquie is our concern here. A certain amount is known about its history. It was erected in 1256 by Giovanni Giacomo Capocci and his wife Vinia, and this fact was recorded in an inscription. Capocci and his wife were represented on a small mosaic panel on the side of the tabernacle. After the dismantling of the tabernacle this panel was subsequently removed to the small church of S. Michele at Vico in Lazio, where it still remains in a chapel to the left of the choir (Pl. XXXIV). The four porphyry columns which supported the tabernacle were transferred to the Cappella del SS. Crocifisso in S. Maria Maggiore.

Although the church of SS Quirico e Giulitta near the Forum of Augustus received its present aspect in the first half of the eighteenth century, it is mentioned in the eighth century and the building incorporates ancient elements (which seem to be even earlier than the eighth century) in sufficient quantity to afford a good idea of the main outlines of the original building. It had an unusual plan, but it has received scant attention from students of medieval Roman architecture. The relevant historical data has been collected by A. Rava and L. Montalto in two useful articles but both of these ignore important archaeological evidence; and although the architecture of the church has been mentioned by G. Giovannoni, his interpretation of it (as a late medieval structure in the “gothic” style) seems to be wholly mistaken.

The extensive traces of Roman centuriation and its associated farms identified from aerial photographs near Lucera, ancient Luceria, in the plain of northern Apulia, have generally been attributed to the Gracchan agrarian reforms of the 130s/120s BC. However, the dating of these land divisions, on the basis of the excavation of the farms and centuriation roads by John Bradford and Barri Jones in 1949–50 and 1962–3, is of questionable reliability, and their work at Luceria was never properly published. This study reanalyses the scattered records and dating evidence from the excavation of seven farms of Bradford and Jones and three other sites surveyed by Bradford in the ager Lucerinus. This study argues that the farms and associated grids belong to Rome's establishment of a Latin colony at Luceria in 326 or 315/314 BC during the Second Samnite War, and that the farms were abandoned due to the Hannibalic War. This study therefore presents the earliest certain Roman centuriation for a colony, and it observes the devastating impact of Hannibal's invasion and prolonged occupation on landholding in southeastern Italy, which has been doubted in recent work on Italian agrarian history. In no other part of Italy does there exist a coherent group of nearby excavated small-scale farms, which provides new insight into Roman colonization in Apulia and the consequences of the Hannibalic War.

With the release in the year 2000 of the film Gladiator, and the exhibition ‘Gladiators and Caesars’ in Hamburg and London, Roman spectacular entertainments, never out of the public eye for long, have returned once again to the limelight. Chief among these entertainments are gladiatorial games and chariot races, exerting a pull on the modern imagination through the famous re-enactments of them in popular films — such as Spartacus or the famous chariot race in Ben-Hur — as much as through our knowledge of their popularity in antiquity, often summed up in Juvenal's comment that the Roman plebs wanted only ‘panem et circenses’. Yet there was more to Roman spectacle than gladiators and chariots, popular as these were. The aim of this paper is to use the visual evidence from mosaics in Ostia and Rome to investigate the Roman reactions to another type of public spectacle, Greek athletic contests. These were held in Rome periodically from 186 BC, and gained a new momentum in AD 86 with Emperor Domitian's institution of a permanent four-yearly festival on Greek lines in honour of the Capitoline triad (Suetonius, Domitian 4).

During field survey in the area of the Monti della Tolfa, carried out by the Gruppo Archeologico Romano between 1975 and 1984, a clandestine excavation was discovered. It yielded a concentration of pottery sherds from the rubbish dump of a small rural settlement of the second quarter of the second century BC. Some of the pottery was of local production, whilst some had been imported. The study of the finds in comparison with those from published sites dated to between the middle of the third and the end of the second centuries BC allows this pottery facies to be placed clearly within a quite precise chronological framework. This phase coincides with the construction, or the definitive laying out, of the Via Claudia, within the context of the general territorial restructuring that was taking place in South Etruria and central Italy, undertaken by the Roman state between the end of the Second Punic War and the middle of the second century.

Among Roman families of the late Republic and early Principate few are so intriguing to the cultural historian as those who had interests in the Eastern Mediterranean, and contributed in one way or another to the gradual Hellenization of Rome, and even, to some extent, the Romanization of the East; while it must be of interest to those concerned with social and economic history to see what can be established about the organization of architectural work and artistic production during this period. It is clear that systems of some complexity did exist; it has been pointed out that the farming of public contracts, which could be on a large scale, required a representative of citizen status, able to give praedes and praedia, while the skilled workmen involved were likely to be, at least some of them, his slaves or freedmen.

The area under study comprises the southeastern section of Lucania bounded on the north by the high land separating the Bradano and Basento valleys, on the south by the Agri River, on the west approximately by a line from Vaglio to Grumento and on the east by a line from Tursi to Miglionico. This paper forms a part of a general survey of the ancient routes of Lucania and Apulia.

The literary sources offer in the area under consideration very limited assistance in ascertaining the location of any routes, but they may shed some light on the date and distribution of some settlements and their road networks. The main tools are air photography and autopsy.

The extremely rugged terrain imposes stringent limits on possible locations of the ancient roads, so that many are fairly easy to follow. Erosion, however, has been extensive, and in some areas the precise line of an ancient road is impossible to recover.

This article argues that Onofrio Panvinio's 1571 study of the Roman triumph embodies a central innovation of sixteenth-century classical scholarship, the use of visual reconstructions alongside textual accounts to communicate the details of ancient ceremonies. Panvinio built on the work of predecessors, most notably Pirro Ligorio, to produce a densely-detailed image of the triumphal procession in the style of Roman bas-reliefs, using the evidence of coins, friezes and texts. This illustration can be seen as an alternative historical rendition, rather than as an accompaniment to a textual description of the triumph. More generally, it reveals the creativity of Renaissance antiquarianism, a movement usually seen as devoted to the dry accumulation of evidence about antiquity, not its imaginative interpretation.

The road which is the subject of this article was first drawn to our attention in the winter of 1963–64 by Professor Dinu Adamesteanu, then Director of the Aerofototeca del Ministero. The area concerned, between the Via Prenestina and the Via Casilina, was already threatened with the development which has since overwhelmed large tracts of the periphery, and in the spring and summer of 1964 we made a number of field trips to record what could then be seen of the road itself and of the sites immediately adjoining it. Shortly afterwards, on learning that the topographical record of this whole area had been placed in the capable hands of Dr. Lorenzo Quilici, the results of whose work will shortly appear in a volume of the Forma Italiae, we turned our attention elsewhere. (Plate XVIII; Fig. 1.)

Since then indiscriminate building has in fact engulfed large stretches of the Via Prenestina; the banks of the Fosso di Pratolungo (Fosso di Ponte di Nona) have been savagely quarried for tufa, and the Ponte di Nona, the finest Roman bridge of the whole Campagna, has become the epicentre of a vast municipal garbage dump.

Our campaign of 1908 in Sardinia began at the end of September and lasted altogether till the middle of November. On the 13th of October I was joined by Mr. F. G. Newton, architect to the British School, whose skilful handiwork in the shape of many drawings of the dolmens, Tombs of the Giants, and Nuraghi we visited together there will be occasion to admire in what follows. On October 20 the Director arrived from Malta and joining forces with us stayed in the island till November 8, when the duties of the School called him back to Rome. To him we were able to announce several interesting discoveries and our exceptional good luck continued right to the end of our sojourn in Sardinia.

The retiring British Ambassador in Rome, Sir Edwin Egerton, followed our varying fortunes with his usual enlightened and cordial interest. Again in the island we experienced many deeds of kindness and hospitality both from persons in authority and from the simple villagers of the mountains. Unfortunately for us Professor Taramelli was absent at the Archaeological Congress at Parma, and a long and severe illness—now happily recovered from—deprived us of the pleasure and profit of Cavaliere Nissardi's company on one or other of our various rounds. Once more we experienced at Gennamari and at Iglesias the courteous hospitality of the Hon. T. A. and Lady Idina Brassey.