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.

In my earlier paper on the ‘Stanze di Venere’ (written in 1973), I referred to the progressive deterioration of the stucco and other decorations in the Roman remains at Baia. The following pages are an attempt to provide a full record of the Baian stucco-work not covered in the first article. The idea of compiling this record originated with Dottssa. Maria Elena Bertoldi and received the full support of Prof. Alfonso De Franciscis; while the actual drawings were begun in 1973 by Miss Shelagh Rixon and completed, with further visits to the site for checking in 1974 and 1975, by Dr. Lesley A. Ling. To all of these and to our sponsors (the University of Manchester and the Faculty of Classics in the University of Cambridge) I am deeply indebted. Since the drawings were completed, the task of studying stucco decoration in Roman Italy has been greatly simplified by the pioneer-work of Dr. Harald Mielsch of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, who has compiled a major corpus of surviving material and attempted to establish a detailed chronology. It only remains for me to provide a commentary on the drawings, to discuss the architectural contexts, and to enlarge upon or modify Dr. Mielsch's conclusions regarding the Baian stucco-work. The various decorations will be dealt with one by one, and the positions of all but two of them are shown on Fig. 1, which has been adapted, by kind permission of Dottssa. Bertoldi, from one of the plans executed for her volume in the Forma Italiae series.

It is one of the saddest losses of history that of Antioch and Alexandria, two of the great early centres of Christian art and learning, hardly a stone should now be standing above ground. Of the two, Alexandria is in the worse case. Antioch can at least boast the magnificent series of mosaics unearthed before the war by the Princeton Expedition. At Alexandria on the other hand there is little chance that excavation can ever reveal any substantial remains of the classical city, which was ruthlessly destroyed in the last century to make way for the expansion of its modern successor; and whereas in the case of the minor arts the contribution of Alexandria to the contemporary art of the Mediterranean, whether in its relation to the Byzantine world or to the nascent Coptic art of Upper Egypt, can at least be usefully discussed in the light of surviving ivories, textiles, manuscript illustrations, and the like, in the field of architecture and of architectural ornament any such enquiry is hampered by a vacuum at the heart of the problem. The questions so well defined by Kitzinger in regard to Coptic sculpture are capable of wider application.

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.

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:

The deliberate, senseless destruction of the documents belonging to the Grande Archivio di Stato of Naples is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, single crime against history committed by the German army during the late war. The circumstances and the results of the act which reduced to ashes this vast collection of records of Southern Italy, covering more than a thousand years, are not as widely known among scholars, much less the general public, as they should be, and they seem therefore to call for some brief account in order to explain the reason of the present publication. Evacuated because of the dangers of air-warfare over Naples from the Archivio to the Villa Montesano near to S. Paolo Belsito some thirty kilometres away, and packed for the most part into 866 solid cases, this priceless treasure of over 30,000 MS. volumes and 50,000 documents under the charge of a keeper of Archives remained undiscovered by the German command until the Allied troops were already approaching.

On 28 September, 1943, however, a foraging party came to the Villa in search of calves wanted for food and found instead cases of records stored for safety. Next morning an officer accompanied by a single soldier arrived; he ordered one of the chests to be opened and carefully inspected the volumes packed within. After the purely historical nature of the deposit had been explained to him and its immense importance from this point of view, he professed himself satisfied and departed.

The two Anglican churches in Rome by the distinguished nineteenth-century English architect George Edmund Street — St Paul's Within-the-Walls (1872–6), Via Nazionale, and All Saints’ (1880–7), Via del Babuino — are notable examples of High Victorian design. Yet little scholarly attention has been afforded either church, especially All Saints’. This article considers both these buildings not so much as works of architecture but as markers of cultural intent in an environment (and age) fraught with political and religious tension and conflict. It seeks to understand them in the difficult and often fluid context of Risorgimento Italy out of which they emerged, including the city of Rome immediately following its capture by Italian national forces on 20 September 1870. The aim is to establish an interpretation of the two buildings that pays due attention to their political and religious agency. In so doing this article considers closely how architecture was understood as a mediating force in the struggle over politics and identity in the late nineteenth century. In taking a fresh look at the extant archival documentation, alternative possibilities are offered (and revealed) as to how we might further decode the significance of these beguiling if still largely misunderstood works of architecture.

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.

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.

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.

This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (primarily in 2013, but also in the first part of 2014), gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions and newspaper reports.

The construction date of the ‘Servian’ wall and its layout in the riverside area between the Aventine and the Capitol are the two main questions addressed in this article. The interlocking topographical problems were addressed in 1988 by Filippo Coarelli, whose interpretation has become the generally accepted orthodoxy. But not all the difficulties have been solved, and with Coarelli's recent return to the subject a fresh examination of the evidence may be helpful. Careful attention is given here to stories of early Rome that involve the walls and gates, as reported in Livy, Dionysius and Plutarch; they are not, of course, taken as authentic evidence for the time of the alleged events, but as indicating what was taken for granted when the stories were first composed. New suggestions are made about a revision of the line of the city wall in 212 BC and the consequent restructuring of two important gates, the Porta Carmentalis and the Porta Trigemina; the mysterious ‘Porta Triumphalis’ is discussed separately in an appendix.

Nonostante le visite di Tiberio a Capri siano state documentate estensivamente dagli autori antichi, e molti siti romani siano ancora visitabili sull'isola, la sua storia imperiale dopo Tiberio rimane largamente sconosciuta. Molta attenzione è stata riservata alle dodici ville che si suppone siano state costruite dall'imperatore, delle quali solo una manciata è stata identificata con sicurezza; ma nessuna fase principale di costruzione è stata attribuita ad un periodo più tardo della tradizionale fase augusteatiberiana. Allo stesso modo, nessun'altra visita da parte di altri imperatori è stata ricordata dalle fonti letterarie, nonostante l'esilio della moglie di Commodo e della sorella dall'imperatore stesso indichi almeno che l'isola rimase un possesso imperiale. Inoltre essa continuò ad essere associata esclusivamente a Tiberio dagli studiosi antichi fino al V secolo d.C. Per dare un senso ai dati frammentari pertinenti al destino di Capri dopo la morte di Tiberio, questo articolo considera le fonti epigrafiche riguardanti l'attivita imperiale sull'isola. L'esistenza di un'unica informazione su un gruppo di schiavi imperiali che una volta servivano sull'isola offrono una prospettiva su un evento eccezionale nell'organizzazione della casa imperiale, probabilmente da datarsi alla prima parte del regno di Claudio, che influenzò l'ulteriore storia imperiale dell'isola.

The Colosseum is well understood as a dynastic monument that was key to the Flavian building programme and to Flavian ideology. From this point of view it has been approached as the fulfilment of Augustus's ambition for a large-scale amphitheatre, as serving to diminish Nero's memory as it was constructed on the atrium of his dismantled Golden House, and as a victory monument built with the spoils of the Jewish War. One important political aspect of this dynastic monument has been largely overlooked: its connection with emperor worship. Outside Rome, it is well known that amphitheatres served as a venue for the procession and placement of imperial cult images; in Rome, the Circus Maximus and the theatres were venues for the display of imperial images and attributes brought in during their respective pompae. Through the deployment of textual, topographical and visual evidence, this article demonstrates that the Colosseum also had a pulvinar that displayed images and attributes of the gods and divi brought in during the pompa. The location of the pulvinar and the mechanisms by which it was serviced are explored, as are the ideological implications of cultic activity in the Colosseum.

Ephemeral architecture was the antithesis of the permanent buildings typical of the ‘Fascism of stone’, and yet many architects took advantage of this paradox to create an imaginary Rome. A widespread use of ephemeral structures was made around 1938, during the Mostra Augustea della Romanità and Hitler's state visit to Italy, in order to support a political programme that marked the totalitarian turn in the Fascist regime after the foundation of the empire and aimed at strengthening the alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Relying on methodologies of particular relevance to Roman art history and on various sources unknown to date, this paper investigates the relationships between ephemeral architecture and romanità. The case study is a monumental tribune built in via dei Trionfi that inevitably suffered a damnatio memoriae: a combination of classicizing and futuristic decorations, it looked back at ancient Rome and, at the same time, highlighted the Fascist regime's aspirations to might and modernity.

In a well-known passage, the Greek historian Polybius, writing in the mid-second century BC, attributes Rome's success as a republic to a perfect balance of power between its constituent elements, army, senate and people (Histories 6.11); and indeed, the Republic's long survival was an achievement worth explaining. On another note, over a century later, Livy remarked how Republican Rome, with its rambling street plan and miscellany of buildings, compared unfavourably with the magnificent royal cities of the eastern Mediterranean; he put this down to hasty rebuilding after a great Gallic conflagration around 390 BC. Few scholars now accept his explanation. A handful of scholars argue for underlying rationales, usually when setting up the early city as a foil for its transformation under Augustus and subsequent emperors, and their conclusions tend towards characterizing the city's design as an unintended corollary to the annual turnover of magistrates. This article, likewise, argues for the role of government in the city's appearance; but it contends that the state of Republican urbanism was deliberate. A response, of sorts, to both ancient authors' observations, it addresses how provisions to ensure equilibrium in one of the Republic's components, the senatorial class, in the interests of preserving the res publica, came at a vital cost to the city's architectural evolution. These provisions took the form of intentional constraints (on time and money), to prevent élite Romans from building like, and thus presenting themselves as, Mediterranean monarchs. Painting with a broad chronological stroke, it traces the tension between the Roman Republic in its ideal state and the physical city, exploring the strategies élite Romans developed to work within the constraints. Only when unforeseen factors weakened the state's power to self-regulate could the built city flourish and, in doing so, further diminish the state. Many of these factors — such as increased wealth in the second century and the first-century preponderance of special commands — are known; to these, this article argues, should be added the development of concrete.