Si presentano alcuni esemplari di ‘Spiral Ware’ medievale da Cartagine insieme ai risultati delle analisi mineralogico-petrografiche degli impasti e di un'analisi del rivestimento. Dalla prima analisi si possono distinguere due gruppi di ‘Spiral Ware’: il 1° gruppo, di origine vulcanica e quindi importato, potrebbe venire dall' Etruria o dalla Campania, e corrisponde strettamente ad esemplari trovati a Roma. Il 2° gruppo è stato riconosciuto quì per la prima volta, e potrebbe originare dall'Italia meridionale.

Si nota che un'osservazione macroscopica dei loro caratteri non distingue tra questi gruppi per quanto riguarda la forma e la decorazione. Si suppone dunque una tecnica di produzione notevolmente standard.

The article begins by looking at the body of written and visual material that was produced on the colonial world in the interwar years. It considers various reading strategies that can be applied to this body of work and how it can be addressed through post-colonial criticism. The article argues that the work of the sociologist Peter Berger offers a series of insights into the way in which this material represents the social world, and the notions of collective identity and alterity that are central to that world. In the light of Berger's thinking on the socially constructed nomos, the essay examines some of the definitions of the relation between metropolitan and subject communities that recur in writings on the reality of colonialism. The essay explores the relationship of an individual author to the nomos of his or her time by looking in detail at one text: the journalist Ciro Poggiali's diary of the time he spent in Ethiopia in the immediate aftermath of the Italian conquest of the country. It examines how Poggiali's diary can be interpreted as a complex account of how the coerciveness of the social world is experienced by individual consciousness and how its definitions of racial and cultural belonging can be appropriated or challenged. The essay concludes by arguing that the analysis of strategies for defining identity and otherness within the Italian colonial context can be taken further by working within a comparative framework.

Scholarship on the fourteen Augustan regions of Rome has tended to focus on their political and topographical significance. As a result, evidence for their social meaning and their impact on the mindsets and practices of the city's administrators and rulers has been under-exploited. This article seeks to address this lacuna. It begins by reviewing the history of Rome's regions and asking how and where the boundaries of the Augustan regions were recorded, before moving on to consider the impact of the regions on the Romans’ understanding and experiences of their city. This includes examining the evidence for bottom-up social identification with the regions, despite their top-down original creation. The paper also looks at the administrators who worked with the regions (regional magistrates and the food, water and fire services), arguing that the conceptual framework which the regions provided began to shape their working practices. Finally, it demonstrates the existence of a rhetoric of consistent provision across all fourteen regions, propagated especially by the emperors. The findings across all of these areas reveal that it is essential to take the regions and their impact into account when attempting to understand the topography of the city and the lives of its inhabitants.

Sin dai primi studi sul cantiere e sul processo costruttivo delle architetture antiche, esempi storicamente ben documentati di età medievale e moderna sono stati presi come riferimento e termine di paragone, al fine di comprendere più approfonditamente l'industria delle costruzioni nell'antica Roma. Questo contributo riflette circa la possibilità di utilizzare due casi di studio parzialmente simili per dimensioni, ubicazione e tecniche costruttive: la Basilica di San Pietro, di età rinascimentale e barocca, in comparazione con l'antico complesso di Domiziano, estensione dei Palazzi Flavi sul Palatino. I primi risultati, che si iscrivono in un progetto di studio sul Complesso domizianeo, aggiungono nuovi elementi alla ricostruzione teorica del cantiere e del ciclo costruttivo. Si analizzano diversi aspetti di questi due progetti architettonici di grandi dimensioni (XXL structures) – la committenza, la forza lavoro, l'approvvigionamento dei materiali da costruzione, l'allestimento del cantiere – evidenziando analogie e differenze, nel tentativo di ovviare alle lacune nella documentazione antica.

This paper brings together literary, epigraphic and iconographic evidence for the victimarii — the attendants responsible for slaughtering sacrificial animals in ancient Rome. It aims to explore the problematic status of victimarii in Roman society, and argues that the often hostile views of the aristocracy have led to the continued marginalisation of this prominent group within scholarly discussions of religion and society. It argues that when the various strands are considered together a far more positive view of victimarii within Roman society emerges, suggesting that this was in some respects one of the most respectable of professions among the slave and freedman communities.

The occasion of the following notes is the publication of Goffredo Bendinelli's useful monograph on Roman Turin, which raises once more the question of the date to which the Gates of that colonia belong. Bendinelli does not hesitate to adopt Rivoira's view, and classifies these Gates as Augustan. Yet opinions about this matter have veered considerably, and since no writer discusses in detail the structural points upon which the question turns, it seems worth while to do this and to consider at the same time the great Gate at Spello, known as the Torri di Properzio, which closely resembles the Gates of Torino, and about which Rossini at least raised some discussion.

Torino–Augusta Taurinorum. A start is given here by the town-plan and by the sections of D'Andrade. There is no doubt that the chess-board town-plan, with the Wall which bounds it, belongs to the Augustan colonia of 28 B.C., as comparison with the plans of Aemona (34 B.C.) and Aosta (25 B.C.) suffices to prove. Again, the visible part of the Wall, together with D'Andrade's drawings of much that is not now accessible, show that the Wall now visible was the first on its site, and that its construction in receding tiers connects it with the contemporary Wall of Aosta; while its facing, in brick and opus incertum, exactly resembles that of the Theatre of Torino, which formed part of the Augustan lay-out and is now visible in the Gardens of Palazzo Chiablese.

This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (in the second half of 2018 and the first half of 2019) gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions, and newspaper reports.

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.

This article reassesses artistic production in Rome at the time of the temporary return of Pope Urban V, between 1367 and 1370, after a lengthy period of absence of the papacy in Avignon, and offers new insights into the long-term impact of this production. It does so by starting from a thoroughly neglected artwork now in the Museo Storico Artistico del Tesoro di S. Pietro, a victim of the traditional interpretative dichotomy as either a work by Giotto or not. By taking a different methodological approach, which is to think in terms of movement of patrons and artists, and on the basis of combined technical/visual analysis and documentary sources, the article sheds new light on this painting, offering new proposals concerning its dating, attribution, original location and function. It then addresses its historical contextualization and significance, allowing us to rethink art in Rome in the fourteenth century by discussing the role that the circulation of patrons and artists played in creating new forms. This discussion not only contributes to a better understanding of the art produced in Rome in the Trecento but also throws some light on the very origins and nature of Renaissance art.

Rome's man-made mounds occupy a position between built antiquities and natural features. In the Middle Ages and early modern period, particular attention was paid to Monte Testaccio, the Mausoleum of Augustus, and the related ‘mons omnis terra’. Debate focused on the origins and composition of the mounds, thought to contain either earth brought to Rome as symbolic tribute, pottery used to hold monetary tribute, or pottery produced locally. Developing over time in different genres of writing on the city, these interpretations were also employed in works on historical, religious and geological themes. The importation of material, expressive of relations between Rome and the wider world in antiquity, was used to draw positive and negative comparisons with present-day rulers and the papacy, and to associate Rome with Babylon. The growth of the mounds and the presence of ceramics were invoked in discussions of the formation of mountains and montane fossils. If the mounds' ambiguities facilitated their incorporation into other debates, the terms in which they are discussed reflect ongoing engagement with literature on the city. The reception of these monuments thus offers a distinctive perspective on the significance of Rome to connections between spheres of knowledge in this period.

Violence and peace-making in medieval Italy have often been analysed in urban environments. But what happened if two powerful baronial families clashed in the countryside? This paper, by looking at the feud between the Farnese and Orsini di Pitigliano during the Western Schism, illuminates various patterns of conflict and conciliation. Such conflicts witnessed the participation of relatives, allies, and subjects who shared in the sense of community and honour of their lords. The various motivations for actors to become involved on behalf of or in opposition to barons are analysed here in detail. The events of the Farnese–Orsini feud on the micro-level are linked to wider developments on the Italian peninsula and European politics. In the second part of this paper the successful conclusion of the feud is analysed in light of the return of the papacy to Rome. The meticulous detail in which the peace agreement was hammered out then provides further insight into the strategies employed by baronial families to maintain the peace. In all, this paper therefore contributes to the study of violence and peace-making as well as of the Italian nobility during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.