Recent research reveals what we term a ‘discourse of certainty’ regarding an assumed predominant socio-economic and cultural impact of Late Bronze Age Cypriotes or Mycenaeans on the local peoples of Sardinia and/or Sicily and Italy, not least in terms of a systematic, seaborne trading network extending from the Cyprus to the Tyrrhenian Sea. ‘Minimalist’ approaches to such a phenomenon have a long and venerable but more limited pedigree. In this study, we question why minimalist views have been so summarily dismissed in much current literature that seeks to evaluate an eastern Mediterranean presence or influence in the central Mediterranean. We focus on Sardinia, and on the range of Cypriot or ‘Cypriot-type’ materials found there. We consider the nature of the Cypriot–Sardinian relationship, and suggest that we should decouple foreign objects from foreign agents. We question several of the perceived Cypriot influences on Sardinian artefacts, and consider possible alternative mechanisms and routes of exchange between the east and central Mediterranean. We outline and discuss the array of presumed or actual Cypriot artefacts found on Sardinia, and argue that these do not add up to a ‘significant’ corpus of Late Cypriot materials and connections.

From the end of the third century BC on, the funerary culture of the Etruscan city of Chiusi saw the gradual disappearance of the most expensive containers and tombs. At the same time, there was first a dramatic increase in the number of such monuments, followed by an equally sharp decline in the first century BC. The qualitative development has traditionally been explained using sumptuary laws, which should have constrained funerary expenditure. However, a close examination of the local evidence reveals that this is not only unlikely, but also does not explain the quantitative development and why there was a social and cultural need to constrain these funerary objects in the first place. Using the concepts of distinction and habitus developed by Bourdieu, this paper analyses the developments in Chiusine funerary practice by focusing on social interactions within and between élites and non-élites. This gives both groups agency in a complex social, cultural and political process that caused the criteria for distinction to change, ultimately making funerary culture less important for status differentiation in the rapidly changing context of Hellenistic Italy.

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.

The object of study in this paper is four unpublished kilns excavated in 2012 at Montelabate (Perugia, Italy), in the framework of the Montelabate Project. The workshop, in use from the mid-first to the fifth century AD, which produced amphorae, coarseware and tile, offers an interesting model for the study of the economy of production in Regio VI (Umbria). The location of the workshop allows the exploration of wider issues such as connectivity, changes in local and regional markets, and continuity in the exploitation of natural resources: the site had a rich clay deposit and was surrounded by densely forested hills, whilst the flat fertile fields were suitable for agriculture and wine production; connectivity was ensured by the river Ventia, a tributary of the Tiber, and by an internal road that joined the Via Flaminia. The paper discusses the substantial number of failed flat-bottomed wine amphorae of the Spello type, discovered at Montelabate, that revealed a large-scale production with little standardization, as eight different local types were identified. The manufacturing complex provides new evidence for a production system that played an important role on a larger regional scale as well as in the local economic network, which continued until the fifth century AD.

Although commercial activity was one of the central features of Roman urban centres, the identification of commercial space in the archaeological record is not always straightforward. Identifications are routinely made through the application of Latin nomenclature to particular architectural typologies, almost inevitably leading to interpretations of space influenced by both textual and modern analogies, a practice which can be most clearly demonstrated by the so-called taberna. Using the taberna as a case-study, this paper explores the issues of Latin nomenclature and textual analogy; architectural typology and modern analogy; and material evidence and functional space, demonstrating the difficulties of identifying specific functions for so-called tabernae in the archaeological record. It argues that a much wider variety of spaces should be viewed as potentially commercial, since commerce — and especially retail — could take place almost anywhere, and suggests ways in which we could use the ancient evidence to look for commerce beyond the taberna, demonstrating the commercial potential of streets, porticoes, arcades, open spaces, and even private houses, since the separation of commercial and domestic activities in the ancient world was minimal.

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.

This paper presents the findings of a survey of the funerary monuments and burial vault of an exiled community of Gaelic Irish who were interred (1608–23) at San Pietro in Montorio, Rome. The site of their burial and commemoration had an eventful history that resulted in loss, fragmentation and alteration of the ledgers of élite members of the group, including those of the respective chiefs and earls of the Ulster lordships of Tyrone and Tyrconnell in Ireland. The original form and layout of the ledgers and their inscriptions is proposed and they are examined in the context of their setting in a Franciscan church patronized by Philip III of Spain. The ledger inscriptions commemorate both the suffering and Counter-Reformation confessional identity of the Gaelic Irish as Catholic exiles. They indicate tension between the complex political circumstances of the exiles’ lives in Rome and a concern to provide an appropriate burial site publicly reflecting their status and piety.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, archaeological activities in Rome intensified considerably under the pontificate of Pius VI (1775–99), and new excavations in the Roman Campagna and the Latium, together with the erection of the Museo Pio Clementino (1776–84), excited considerable interest in Roman learned and literary circles. A young poet who had moved to Rome from Romagna, Vincenzo Monti (1754–1828), obtained his first great success by celebrating the new discoveries in a memorable poem, La prosopopea di Pericle. In it, a newly found herm of Pericles sings of Pius's pontificate as a new golden age for the arts. Monti, who was to become Italy's most authoritative man of letters in the following decades, befriended in those years, and received considerable assistance from, the leading antiquarian of that age, Ennio Quirino Visconti (1751–1818). Their relationship and its legacy provide the subject of this paper, with emphasis on Monti's early poetry, its significance for the literary history of the neoclassical age, and its role in shaping a novel poetic style intended for the praise of ancient art.

This article traces the extraordinary architectural production of the Roman branch of the Istituto Case Popolari (Institute of Public Housing, ICP) during the period between 1925 and 1930. This was the most prolific and creative period in the history of the Institute, delivering a rich portfolio of distinctive public housing projects in and around Rome with modest means and against the backdrop of a severe housing crisis. It was also the period when a single architect, Innocenzo Sabbatini, left his creative mark on the most significant of the Institute's executed projects. Under Sabbatini's creative lead, the ICP sought to advance a distinctive, coherent vision for public housing while also producing a singular architectural language that was both modern and unmistakably ‘situated’ in the traditions and the ambience of Rome. I examine the three arguably most innovative ICP projects of this period bearing Sabbatini's signature: the Albergo Rosso in Garbatella; the so-called Casa del Sole in Tiburtino; and the unrealized Trionfale Nuovo project. Through these three projects, I seek to trace a fascinatingly singular Roman road to architectural modernism that pre-dated the ‘heroic’ phase of razionalismo in Rome during the early 1930s but has been largely redacted from the narratives of modernist architecture.

This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (primarily in 2016, but also in the first part of 2017), gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions and newspaper reports.