The ruins of the ancient Phoenician colony of Motya, well known to history as one of the three main Phoenician settlements in Sicily (Thucydides vi.2,6), are situated on the small island of Mozia (S. Pantaleo) within the shallow lagoon which stretches from Marsala towards Trapani. The city had an eventful history as one of the mainstays of Punic power in Sicily; but it was destroyed by Dionysius of Syracuse after an epic siege in 397 B.C., and thereafter, ceding place to Lilybaeum on the mainland nearby, its ruins remained virtually deserted. The object of some scientific curiosity during the late seventeenth and eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, the site had to wait for systematic exploration until the beginning of the twentieth. It was then that the little island passed into the hands of Mr. Joseph Whitaker, and was partly excavated by him: he revealed large stretches of the circuit walls, two monumental gateways, ruins of a big public building or temple, and several cemeteries.

Cyrene's largest religious building, the great Temple of Zeus on the north-eastern hill of the city, has been the subject of several explorations. Its cella was partially dug out by Smith and Porcher in 1861, and was completely cleared of soil by the late Giacomo Guidi in 1926, in the excavation which brought to light the famous head of Zeus, pieced together from over a hundred fragments. Then, in the years 1939–1942, fuller work was carried out by Dr. Gennaro Pesce, who published a detailed report with admirable promptness. Despite the interruptions caused by the North African campaigns of the World War, Pesce was able to clear the greater part of the Temple and its fallen peristasis. At the conclusion of his work only the opisthodomos remained unexcavated, although much fallen stone still encumbered the pronaos and the eastern portico.

The modern town of Sutri lies 50 km. north of Rome, beside the Via Cassia, on the site of the ancient Sutrium (pl. X, a, b). It was already in existence in Etruscan times, passed to the Romans at the beginning of the fourth century b.c., was twice colonised by them and reached a peak of prosperity under the early Empire. It continued to flourish in the early Middle Ages, but a rapid decline set in after the fourteenth century and the town to-day is comparatively modest and unimportant.

The following report is concerned mainly with the ancient town and with a typical area of the surrounding countryside (7 km. × 12 km. in extent), as it was in Etruscan and Roman times (fig. 1, p. 64). It is chiefly a record of the archaeological remains found in the area during five months' fieldwork in the winter and spring, 1957–1958, undertaken as part of the British School's current programme of survey in southern Etruria, which is designed to record permanently such remains before they disappear for ever, as they are fast doing.

The antiquities of the ancient town itself are already well known and have been described several times in the past. But, apart from occasional references to isolated finds and an attempt towards the end of the last century to map the ancient roads, the countryside outside the town has never been properly explored. The bulk of the original work, therefore, lies in sections III and IV. The Etruscan and the Roman roads have been located, as far as is possible, and all the sites which are still to be found have been recorded. In certain areas present-day woodland concealed a few, notably round the small town of Bassano di Sutri and towards the summit of M. Calvi, south of Sutri, and cultivation in the immediate vicinity of the modern towns may have destroyed a few more, especially near Ronciglione; but at the most it is probable that only about 20 sites were lost or missed in this way, as opposed to a total recorded of some 220. Except for woodland, all the ground within the limits of the area chosen was walked over and examined.

The three inscriptions described below were seen and photographed at Ghadames in 1955 by Mr. C. J. Barron and subsequently re-examined by Mrs. Olwen Brogan. They illustrate the three main phases of the history of the oasis in classical antiquity—the life of the Roman garrison established in the early third century A.D., of the resultant civil settlement with its Latin speech and customs and, finally, of the native Libyans, using the Latin alphabet but their own language, presumably in the gradual barbarisation of the place after the withdrawal of the garrison. They are published here by kind permission of Dr. Vergara-Caffarelli, Director of Antiquities in Tripolitania.

1. Moulded altar of limestone, the top broken away and lost (0·36 × 0·54 × 0·36) inscribed on one face within a sunk panel. There is a vertical groove down the centre of the back, presumably made in order to attach the altar to a wall. Findspot unrecorded. Now in the courtyard of the Mudiriya.

One of the most impressive surviving monuments of Roman rule in Africa is the Caesareum at Cyrené. It was excavated some thirty years ago by the Italian Archaeological Mission, led by the late Gaspare Oliverio, and skilfully restored some years later by the Superintendency of Antiquities for Libya; but owing to the other preoccupations of its original investigators and, subsequently to the accidents of war, it has remained substantially unpublished. Recently it has been the subject of comment by Erik Sjöqvist in his valuable study of the Kaisareion at Alexandria, published in the volume of the Acta of the Swedish Institute in Rome presented to Axel Boethius on his sixty-fifth birthday. The points raised by Sjöqvist are of considerable importance for the study both of the origins and of the later development of a rich field of Roman monumental architecture, and in the summer of 1956 the British School at Rome undertook limited supplementary excavations within the Caesareum with the specific purpose of clearing up some doubtful points of fact. The main purpose of the present article is to present the results of these excavations within the framework of a more detailed architectural description of the site than is at present available.

In Gentile Bellini's painting of a Venetian festa a knight of the Order of St. John stands alone in the Piazza of San Marco. He is dressed in a black cloak adorned with the eight-pointed cross of the Hospitallers and is attended by a single page. The ecclesiastical and lay dignitaries of the Republic file solemnly past; but he has no part in the ceremony and his posture suggests an awareness that the presence of the Order was resented. For two centuries both Venice and the Hospitallers were among the foremost opponents of the Turks in the Mediterranean, but a deep antipathy existed between them. Allies by force of circumstance, their attitudes towards the infidels were in strong contrast and united action often became impossible. On the one side, were traditional elements in Venetian policy, the pre-eminence of trading interests, independence of the church and an opportunist exploitation of crusading ideals; on the other, the Hospitallers' alliance with Venice's greatest rival, Genoa.

The Hospital's Priory of Venice was founded in the twelfth century and by the fourteenth included houses in many parts of Emilia and the Romagna, mostly outside Venetian territory.