This paper examines the iconographic and archaeological evidence for chariot racing in Etruria, its context and audience. We then focus on the representation of the chariot crash — a motif pervasive in Etruscan art on a variety of locally-produced artistic media. The incongruous depiction of the most exciting, dangerous and tragic occurrence in the race alongside scenes of banqueting and dancing complicates our understanding of Etruscan tomb painting and of funeral ritual. Images of chariot crashes reveal an Etruscan appreciation for Greek epic, while also reflecting real details of the burial rite and the nature of élite competition.

The landscape of central Tyrrhenian Italy became increasingly engraved with roads cut deep in the ground in the course of the seventh and sixth centuries bc. This development was mainly for pragmatic reasons, such as the need for better infrastructure and transport facilities resulting from increased vehicular traffic between and within regions. In addition to providing logistic benefits, road-cuttings also contributed to developing the socio-political aspects of the proto-urban centres of central Italy through their monumentality, which arguably was utilized in politicizing territorial landscapes as well as in enhancing funerary rituals. In this paper I shall examine road-cuttings as instruments of urbanization in iron age and Archaic central Italy by attempting to present a point of view in which the road-cuttings in central Italy are seen not only as pragmatic facilities, but also as building blocks of landscapes of power and identity. This goal is approached by using the methods of landscape archaeology and phenomenology in a study of 110 road-cuttings from central Italy and assessing their relations to their physical surroundings.

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.

Although both the urban and rural landscapes of Roman Italy have received due attention in current debates on the Roman economy, this is less true for the highly variable group of intermediate sites, here conveniently labelled as ‘minor centres’, and their role within economic networks. This contribution focuses attention on two such sites, Forum Appii and Ad Medias, situated in the Pontine plain (Lazio, central Italy) along the Via Appia. After addressing issues of definition and the current state of research, we shall approach the potential functions of such sites through geographic models. Next, we discuss the results of a programme of geophysical surveys and field walking on both case-study sites. The results obtained suggest that, although far from being a uniform settlement class, minor centres could perform crucial functions within local and regional economies. Based on the present data, Forum Appii developed into a centre of craft production and, with its river port, also became a trade hub of regional importance. Ad Medias functioned primarily as a small centre provisioning and servicing travellers and the local rural population. To conclude the article, we consider the implications of the results obtained in terms of future research strategies.

In this article the historical profile and the urban landscape of the ancient city of Bari in the Roman period will be examined. This will be achieved through the careful gathering and timely analysis of the available archaeological evidence, from past excavations and recent projects, and also by considering this evidence in the light of the information available from literary, epigraphic and numismatic sources. This study thus aims to rewrite, in a global context and over a long time-span, the detailed historical circumstances and the complex settlement framework of the municipium of Bari, which is documented by and debated through — in the broadest context, taking into account the whole Apulian-Adriatic region — the complex archaeological stratification, the forms of institutional and social organization, the dynamic role assumed by the topographical context in both the urban and rural environment, the character and uniformity of the material culture, and the nature of the limited but significant monumental evidence.

There is a widespread idea that the people we call ‘Phoenician’ called themselves ‘Canaanite’. This article argues that the only positive evidence for this hypothesis, a single line in the standard editions of Augustine's unfinished commentary on Paul's letter to the Romans, where he claims that ‘if you ask our local peasants what they are, they answer ‘Canaanite’', is prima facie highly unreliable as historical evidence, and on closer inspection in fact is almost certainly an editorial error: our examination of all the manuscripts — the first to have been carried out — established that what the peasants were really asked in the archetype was not quid sint — ‘what they are’ — but quid sit — ‘what is it’, a phrase that would most obviously refer to their language. While this new reconstruction of the archetype does not necessarily mean that quid sit was what Augustine originally wrote, this passage cannot be used as positive evidence for Canaanite identity in late antique North Africa, or anywhere else.

The Epirote port of Butrint (now in Albania) features significantly in the neo-Latin epic, the Carlias, by the Florentine Ugolino Verino (1438–1516). This poem was recast on the occasion of the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France, to encourage the young king to imitate his ancestor, Charlemagne, and undertake a crusade. This essay focuses upon the poetic description of Butrint in the light of recent excavations. It reconstructs the run-down character of this fortified Venetian town, as well as the material living conditions of its occupants in 1493. The essay considers how Verino's narrative was shaped by literary sources, rather than the actual circumstances of the port.

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.

Pietro Santi Bartoli was esteemed for his elegant ‘ancient pictures in miniature’, based on the records he made of new discoveries in Rome, but few of the collections made by his patrons survive intact. This paper reconstructs one such, by combining the contents of two sets of coloured drawings, one in London (RIBA Drawings Collection) and the other in Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) to produce a series of records that includes some little-known discoveries of the 1680s. The relationship between Bartoli's sketchy on-site records and the coloured ‘miniatures’ is examined via the ‘Vittoria album’ at Windsor, which contains many of his preparatory drawings.

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.