Il presente testo nasce da alcune considerazioni compiute nel corso della totale revisione dell'opera edita e manoscritta di Antonio Bosio e si focalizza, in senso più ampio, sul fenomeno della nascita dell'archeologia cristiana nel corso del XVI secolo. Partendo da alcuni spunti storici offerti appunto dall'opera di Bosio, vengono presentate alcune vicende relative al cantiere della basilica di San Pietro durante la seconda metà del Cinquecento, testimoniate soprattutto da Tiberio Alfarano. L'obiettivo è quello di riconsiderare il ruolo degli scavi e dei lavori architettonici della Basilica Vaticana nella nascita dell'archeologia cristiana, qualche anno prima dell'accidentale scoperta della catacomba anonima di via Anapo, evento ad oggi considerato l'inizio della disciplina.

February 2021 saw the coincidentally simultaneous publication of two important books about the Augustan Palatine: Dal mostro al principe by Andrea Carandini and Paolo Carafa, and Il complesso di Augusto sul Palatino by Patrizio Pensabene, Patrizio Fileri and Enrico Gallocchio. Since Carandini and Pensabene have been for decades the most significant archaeological investigators of the Palatine, these two major works of synthesis offer a timely opportunity to assess the historical contribution of archaeology in the 60 years since Gianfilippo Carettoni first identified ‘the house of Augustus’. That contribution has been surprisingly disappointing, and this article tries to explain why.

The Janiculum Hill in antiquity was a place of noble villas, military triumphs, ancient burials and Christian martyrdoms, all of which were recorded and interpreted in various ways in the antiquarian maps and literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many of its associations had significance to the Pamphilj family, who bought a modest vigna there in 1630, not long after Giovan Battista Pamphilj (1574–1655) became cardinal. In the fourteen years that separated the purchase of the vigna and the elevation of Cardinal Pamphilj to the papal throne as Innocent X (1644–55) more land was acquired in the area, and the Casino del Bel Respiro, the Pamphilj's palazzo di rappresentanza at the Villa Pamphilj, was eventually built some distance from the original farmhouse, its entrance directly facing the dome of Saint Peter's. The villa played an essential role in constructing a public image for the Pamphilj that was inseparable from their claims to descend from the very founders of Rome, claims that were delineated by Niccolò Angelo Cafferri in his genealogy of the Pamphilj, a work initiated by Cardinal Girolamo Pamphilj (1544–1610) and published in 1662. This paper discusses how Cafferri's genealogy and antiquarian scholarship in Rome contributed to the selection of the Casino's site, design, decoration and iconology.

The relief shown in Plate IA was among those transferred to the Terme Museum from the Villa Ludovisi, where, about 1460, Cassiano Dal Pozzo saw it immured in the wall of a small building to the right of the entrance. Its original provenience is unknown. In his catalogue of the Villa Ludovisi sculpture Schreiber describes it as representing ‘a knight with two at tendants. … On the left a youth walks forward to the 1. He wears a sleeved tunic girt at the waist, and shoes; and carries on his right shoulder a short stave which has been broken off where the relief border is damaged. He is represented almost en face, and turns his head backwards towards the knight. With his left hand he leads by the bridle a richly harnessed horse saddled with a panther-skin. On the horse rides a young (beardless ?) man in short-sleeved tunic and cloak, the latter falling over his left forearm. He is laureate, and holds the horse's rein in his left hand, while the right is raised to the level of his head. … There follows a bearded man wearing tunic and shoes. In his left hand he holds the end of an object slung over his left shoulder (probably a sack …), and in his right hand he lifts up a hemispherical helmet (the left cheek-piece broken off), in the act of placing it on the knight's head.’

This article provides a reconstruction of a Roman funerary complex that was discovered near the Porta Maggiore in Rome at the end of the nineteenth century (1871), using excavation reports and drawings, archival photographs, topographical indications and epigraphic materials. This paper examines the inscriptions discovered inside these tombs, which have been published in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL VI, 5961–6148), but attributed to the wrong funerary context. Thanks to two photographs taken by John Henry Parker in 1871, we can now ‘re-place’ these inscriptions in their original burial chamber. The objective of this study is to use this varied evidence to contribute to our understanding of the archaeological and topographical development of this area, through an analysis of the different periods in which this burial ground was utilized.

The documents published below relate to an exceptional event in Sicilian and Maltese history: the presence on Malta to suppress a rebellion, which was actually led by the royal captain, of a Sicilian king supported by a foreign fleet, that of the Genoese. These documents were known to Gian Luca Barberi, who used information from them in his Capibrevi at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and to the great Maltese historian Gianfrancesco Abela, who was the first to make known a number of these documents concerning the Sicilian monarch's visit to Malta. Abela also knew, from another source, of the attack on the island by Genoese galleys under the command of Tommaso Morchio, but his interpretation of these events was inspired by a monarchical loyalism which led him to ignore the real implications of the documents of 1372 and to construct the hypothesis of a royal visit to Malta designed to restore a situation provoked by a Genoese invasion of the island.

Roberto Valentini seems to have been the first to discern the core of the truth. He understood that the enfeoffments and collations made by Frederick IV between 10 and 14 November 1372 were the price paid for the support of certain families in the reconquest of Malta and Gozo.

Of late years it would appear that the subject of Papal Iconography has been singularly neglected; nor as far as we are aware has the subject been at all exhaustively treated in any monograph. Yet if its claim to importance calls for justification, it should suffice to quote the following passage in which J. A. Symonds records the impression made upon him by the busts of the Popes (Fig. I) which adorn the walls of the Duomo of Siena:

This study forms part of my work as Rome Scholar in Architecture, 1913, and was undertaken in accordance with the Memorandum of the Faculty of Architecture of the British School at Rome.

In collecting and arranging material and in writing these notes I have been helped by my wife who, as holder of the Mary Ewart Travelling Studentship from Newnham College, Cambridge, has collaborated with me throughout. To her I owe many ideas and suggestions of archaeological importance in my scheme for restoration.

Further, I am greatly indebted to Mr. Ernest Prestwich, M.A., A.R.I.B.A. In 1911 Mr. Prestwich made a survey of the existing antiquities of Palestrina with a view to making a restoration. As he was unable to carry out this plan he very kindly put the material he had collected at my disposal. This has been very valuable to me throughout.

The purpose of this paper is to document and discuss some less well known pieces of Etruscan jewellery decorated in the granulated style of the Orientalising period, with special reference to a curious motif occurring on jewels from Praeneste and elsewhere. Although the origin of the motif remains obscure it is almost certainly foreign and is very likely of Phoenician origin. Study of it appears to indicate the impact on Etruscan art of a very highly specialised iconography of which a single Oriental specimen survives.

The motif is found in its simplest—and probably most degenerate—form on pendants embossed with female daemon heads, ending below in a rounded striated boss which resembles a fan-palmette or scallop shell attached below the woman's face. Praeneste jewellery is particularly rich in these. The necklace 1449 of Marshall's Catalogue (Marshall, 1911) has nine stumpy pendants in this form, each consisting of two embossed plaques soldered back to back. The curling side-locks of the fat-faced women are clearly seen. This necklace comes from Praeneste as does necklace 1453 of Marshall's Catalogue (at present mounted with a glass face bead of Phoenician type) where the details of the ‘palmette’ have been picked out in fine granules. Hathoric curled locks are clearly shown on either side of the head, and a ribbed collar separates the head from the shell-like ornament below.

The epigraphy of Roman North Africa is well known to be richer than that of any other Western province. Not only is the total number of inscriptions large, but their wide distribution makes possible a detailed study of some municipal institutions withoutmuch danger of arguing from evidence from one city to a generalisation covering many. The structure of municipal life in the more populous parts of North Africa was characterised by the large number of communities which, though small, developed genuine civic institutions, as compared with the semi-tribal agglomerations with a few very large cities that we find elsewhere in the Western Empire. Further, many of the sites have been desolate since the end of Roman rule, and no events during that rule brought destruction widespread enough to cause significant gaps in the epigraphy taken as a whole.

This paper deals with the well-known reliefs in the Palazzo Spada at Rome and those related to them, and is an attempt by means of a detailed analysis to determine their date and artistic affinities. As long ago as 1880 Dr. Theodor Schreiber suggested that they contained Hellenistic elements and were to some extent dependent for their motives on paintings. In 1888 he returned to the attack in his book on the Grimani reliefs at Vienna and put forward the view that the Spada and Grimani reliefs and their kin were Alexandrian in origin. In consequence he regards the introduction of rustic and landscape scenes into sculpture as an Alexandrian element, and would assign all reliefs which show such motives to the Alexandrian art of the Hellenistic age.

‘O Veii veteres, et vos tum regna fuistis

Et vestro posita est aurea sella foro:

Nunc intra muros pastoris bucina lenti

Cantat, et in vestris ossibus arva metunt.’

(Propertius IV, 10, 27–30.)

So the Roman poet Propertius, writing in the closing years of the first century B.C., only a very short time before the establishment of the Augustan municipality on the site of the ancient town; and it is the conventional reading of the history of Veii that the four hundred odd years intervening between the sack of the town in 396 B.C. and the foundation of the Municipium Augustum Veiens were years of abandonment and desolation. This view has been challenged recently by Dr. Maria Santangelo in her publication of two small jugs of the third century B.C. with archaic latin dedicatory inscriptions, the one from the Portonaccio cemetery, inscribed L(ucius) Tolonio(s) ded(et) Menerva(e), the other from the Campetti votive deposit Caere (or Crere) L(ucius) Tolonio(s) d(edet). These two dedications are evidence not only of the survival of at least two of the sanctuaries, but also of the continuing residence at or near Veii of a descendent of the Velthur Tulumne who dedicated a bucchero cup in the same Portonaccio sanctuary three centuries earlier (Not. Scav., 1930, pp. 341–343), and of the Lars Tolumnius who was killed in battle and whose armour hung, for all to see, in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius (Prop. loc. cit.).

The major source for the vows and sacrifices made annually on 3 January for the safety of a Roman emperor and his family, and on some other occasions in special circumstances, is in the Acta of the Arval Brothers which preserve, for a number of years in the first, second and third centuries A.D., accounts of these ceremonies as conducted by the Arvals, including the formulae of their prayers. There is literary evidence to show that similar ceremonies took place throughout the Empire, but for their form outside Rome nothing very detailed. Pliny reports their observance in his province in terms which reflect very summarily the general tenour of the prayers; and the Feriale Duranum, col. I lists the sacrifices to be made on the 3rd of January by a military unit in the early third century.