This article demonstrates how a contextual approach to material culture can help us think about the link between Roman hegemony and cultural change in Republican Italy. It does this by focusing on a particular set of artefacts — anatomical votive terracottas — that have been seen to indicate the spread of Roman and/or Latin culture in central Italy. Although the use of anatomical terracottas may have begun in the vicinity of Rome, communities in central Italy actively engaged with these artefacts according to their own cultural dispositions. Such signs of local agency are especially visible in the way that worshippers in the Apennine areas of central Italy favoured votive terracottas depicting legs, feet and hands, instead of reproductive organs, which were more popular in the Tyrrhenian zone. These findings emphasise the key role of local cultural practice in shaping the effect of accelerated political change on the micro-level.

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.

The marble-clad surfaces of the numerous bars or shops (so-called thermopolia) of Pompeii and Herculaneum are a vast and hitherto untapped source of information about marble use beyond the confines of public building and élite houses. Four field seasons of survey work have documented 49 bars at Pompeii and eight at Herculaneum with over 8,000 pieces of stone, mainly marble. This paper discusses the results of this project: first, the types of stone used on these bars and how they were displayed; second, what their quantities and distribution, within these cities and on individual bars, reveal about the pervasiveness of the wider pan-Mediterranean marble trade; third, what we can say about where these materials came from and how they were acquired, and what this in turn reveals about the economics of reuse of architectural materials in the Vesuvian cities.

The subject of the present article is not altogether a new one. In 1895 Professor Lanciani published in the Bullettino Comunale (165–192) an article (cited as L.) under the title of Picturae Antiquae Cryptarum Romanarum, in which he dealt with the results of his examination of the collections at Windsor and Eton and of the Corsini MS. (158, i. 5 : Inv. 130102 sqq.) in Rome.

In 1909 the late Prof. R. Engelmann published his Antike Bilder aus römischen Handschriften (cited as Eng.), with a full description of the contents of the Corsini MS. (cited as Cors.), of two codices in the Vatican (Capp. 284, 285) of a codex in the possession of Mr. St. Clair Baddeley (cited as Badd.) and of Caylus' Recueil de Peintures (edition of 1757); a large number of photographic reproductions are added.

Questo articolo descrive il risveglio d'interesse nell'antica pittura romana nel diciassettesimo secolo a Roma. Sono discusse le figure principali, come: Cassiano dal Pozzo, Cardinal Camillo Massimi, il critico e antiquario G. P. Bellori, e l'artista Pietro Santo Bartoli. I volumi dei disegni ad acquarello, copie di antichi dipinti e mosaici romani, opera di Bartoli (ripubblicati in forma d'incisione con commento di Bellori) furono prima molto stimati poi degradati in Gran Bretagna specialmente nel diciottesimo secolo. Collezioni di tali disegni (di Bartoli e suo figlio) sono specificati a Eton, Windsor e Holkham. Un volume di acquarelli di Bartoli, posteriore ai dipinti e mosaici romani, dedicato al Cardinale Massimi, è stato recentemente trovato nella Biblioteca dell'Università di Glasgow. Questo volume e la sua probabile provenienza, sono trattati in questo articolo nel contesto della raccolta del 18° secolo.

I singoli disegni nel volume sono poi elencati con una breve descrizione riportando le misure e un'indicazione dell'origine e soggetto quando queste sono note. Materiale paragonabile (ad es. disegni simili di altre collezioni inglesi, incisioni ecc.) è riportato dopo ciascuna registrazione.

On the 22nd September, 1950, whilst workmen were digging a trench for the laying of a water main at Ghajn Qajjet, near Rabat, Malta (Malta 2″ Map. Ref. 356247) at a depth of 2 ft. 8 in. below the surface of the road, the burial chamber of a rock-cut tomb was broken into (fig. 1).

This chamber (fig. 2), rectangular in plan and with a flat ceiling, measured 12 ft. in length, 10 ft. in width, and 5 ft. 7 in. in height; its long axis ran in a north-easterly direction. A slab of Globigerina limestone (pl. XII), 6 ft. 5 in. long, 5 ft. 8 in. wide, and 5 in. thick, rested horizontally on the floor and was set with two of its sides in contact with the north-east and the south-east walls; owing to the slight inclination of the floor, being higher towards the north-east, it was propped up by roughly dressed small blocks of stone. There was also a cavity, 10 in. in diameter and 6 in. deep, cut in the floor at a distance of 4 in. from the south-west side of the stone slab and quite close to the south-east wall of the chamber.

The two Latin inscriptions described below were both re-composed during the years 1946–7 in the course of the work of systematisation carried out in the ruins of Lepcis Magna. In the case of the earlier inscription, of Augustus, a small number of inscribed blocks belonging to it had been uncovered during the Italian excavations of 1930–4; but the greater part of the inscription was covered by soil and only brought to light when the fallen west perimeter wall of the Market was re-erected in 1947. It has the distinction of being the earliest dated Latin inscription hitherto found at Lepcis.

The second inscription, of Vespasian and Titus, has no such structural context. Most of its blocks were built into the upper courses of the towers of the main surviving Byzantine Gate of the city; but others were found scattered at street-level in the vicinity of this gate, and had obviously fallen from it. The blocks are inscribed on both faces with parts of two identical texts, and, as explained below, the nature of the bi-frontal inscription suggests that it formerly belonged to a monumental arch, spanning one of the main streets of the city: but the position of this arch cannot be established with any certainty. Certain fragments of this inscription have been published previously; but a relatively complete text is presented here for the first time.

On balance far more is known of trade in luxury goods during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries than of trade in essential foodstuffs and minerals such as wheat and salt. This is surprising in a way, because the sources that refer to commodity movements, such as commercial treaties, are often far more eloquent on vital topics such as grain than they are on the myriad luxury items that passed through Acre, Messina and other great ports of the late twelfth century. Partly this emphasis on high-class goods has been the responsibility of recent historians, who saw in the spasms of Mediterranean trade the key to European economic development; partly it is the fault of the treaties and privileges that survive, for there is no knowing whether, say, two hundred salmae of wheat that a monastery was allowed to export free of tolls represented all its export capacity, part of that capacity, or an amount normally well above that capacity—a purely notional figure.

Investigations at the site of the Mura di Santo Stefano near Anguillara began as a study of the standing remains of the Roman period by the two authors of the present paper. Subsequently it became clear that some of the problems involved could only be elucidated by the excavation of selected areas of the site and more extensive researches. As a result a more general publication about the site is envisaged and further work is in progress, including a study of the inscriptions by Miss J. M. Reynolds, and of the classical and medieval settlement of the area by Dr. A. T. Luttrell. Excavations on the site conducted by Dr. D. Whitehouse commenced in September 1977, with financial support from the British Academy, the British Museum, the British School at Rome, and the University of Adelaide.

The present authors wish to thank Professor H. Burns, who generously advised on problems connected with the drawings and text of Ligorio and Palladio, and T. F. C. Blagg who produced the drawing of the south wall, and added a number of useful observations.

The British Academy, the British Museum, and the University of Adelaide generously made contributions to the expenses incurred in carrying out these researches.

At the beginning of the Principate, Italy, which had been extended to the Alps by the incorporation of Cisalpine Gaul in 42 b.c., was essentially a land of selfgoverning urban communities that exercised authority over an adjacent country district. By the third century, when earlier differences in the legal status of these communities had been largely abolished, the title most commonly applied to them was civitas, although older terminology did not pass entirely out of use: Cassiodorus, for example, twice uses municipium. For the attached country district the usual name was territorium, defined by the second-century jurist Pomponius as universitas agrorum intra fines cuiusqu civitatis. The Christian church adopted the existing Roman civil circumscriptions as the basis of its territorial organisation, so that in ecclesiastical texts civitas came to have the special sense of ‘diocesan see’: in this sense it is common in the Act a of sixthcentury councils. Despite a steady decline in civic autonomy in the later Imperial period, the city and its territory continued to be the basic unit of secular administration. In the fifth century the title of iudex was not yet accorded to any official connected with the city, and this was still so after the Ostrogothic occupation of Italy and the establishment of comites Gothorum.

The main object of the expedition to Umm-el-Jemal, which was financed by the Walker Trust and sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, in the summer of 1956, was to re-examine the evidence for the history of a church building which had been discovered and summarily surveyed by Professor H. C. Butler and the Princeton University Archaeological Expedition to Syria in the years 1904–1905. This was the church which the Princeton expedition named after a certain Julianos and dated to the year A.D. 344 on the basis of an inscription which they found lying in the ruins and which they associated (mistakenly, as it now seems) with the foundation of the church.

Of the hundreds of church buildings which must have been constructed during the first half of the fourth century, very few are known to us, and a church with a recognisable plan and so early a date is a matter of considerable consequence in the study of the development of church architecture. It therefore seemed well worth while to make a special visit to the site of Julianos' church to verify the facts published by the Princeton Expedition; especially as their survey was a rather summary one and seemed, when the writer visited the site in 1953, to be mistaken in more than one important respect.

Il sito della sconfitta romana alle Forche Caudine non viene messo seriamente in dubbio; il dubbio semmai viene dalla lettura del resoconto di Livio. La sua descrizione delle mosse tattiche non trova corrispondenza nelle caratteristiche del terreno. Livio racconta un tipo di battaglia molto diverso, essenzialmente un agguato, posto in una stretta valle montuosa. E' evidente che il resoconto di Livio non indica un'analisi in prima persona ma ha il carattere di una formula, contiene numerosi particolari calcolati per minimizzare la sconfitta romana ed è forse influenzato da dettagli copiati dalle desscrizioni delle campagne di Alessandro.

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.

This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (primarily in 2012, but also in the first part of 2013), gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions and newspaper reports.

Archaeology sheds little light upon the origins of Verona, but ancient literary tradition assigns its foundation to the Rhaetians and Euganeans of northern Italy, while modern philologists do not hesitate to identify the name Verona as Gallic. Actually, there is no doubt that, as Pliny asserts, the town lay in Rhaetian land, for inscriptions mentioning Rhaetian deities and religious functionaries come from its neighbourhood. One may even guess at the site of the Rhaetian oppidum, for there is only one hill at Verona that it can have crowned, namely, the high spur east of the river, on which the Visconti later placed their castle of San Pietro. This overlooks the best point to span the turbulent Adige (Athesis) near Verona, and its position serves as a reminder that the Rhaetians were northern folk looking southwards and choosing to live in a hill-town, like their Gallic kinsmen. The disposition of Trento provides an almost exact parallel, further up the valley.