This paper discusses some of the insights that have been gained from the study of the textile tools from the Etruscan settlement of Poggio Civitate di Murlo and coeval textiles recovered from the adjacent cemetery site of Poggio Aguzzo di Murlo. Over 1,600 textile tools (including spindle whorls, loom weights, and spools) are analysed from a functional perspective, and results suggest that the textiles found in burials were likely produced at the site. This new information is discussed in light of other subsistence and craft activities documented at the settlement, all of which indicate an inward-oriented economy that catered to the local elites and the populations they controlled.

This paper examines how the Romans in the early Republic adopted Celtic panoply, in the process abandoning Greek-style hoplite equipment. The first part details the Celtic aspects of the major pieces of Rome's new military equipment: La Tène sword, oval shield (scutum), javelin (pilum), mail armour and Montefortino helmet. The next section seeks possible military and cultural explanations for this transition, suggesting among other factors that the new kit may have been driven by increased recruitment from beyond the narrow hoplite class. The panoply eventually coalesced into a symbol of specifically Roman identity, especially as the Romans deployed distinctively equipped armies into Magna Graecia and the Hellenistic East.

This article is in two parts. The first part, in Italian, by Giuseppe Schinco, is a study of the typology and technical characteristics of a group of 225 lead slingshots found rather more than twenty years ago by a private metal detectorist on the hill of Botromagno near Gravina in Puglia. The second part, in English, by Alastair Small, is a review of the archaeological evidence for a possible siege of the site within the time frame suggested by the typological study of the slingshots. Since the site, which can be identified with the ancient Silvium, can be shown to have been abandoned around the end of the first quarter of the first century BC within that time frame, we conclude that the siege most probably took place during the slave war of 73–70 BC associated with Spartacus.

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.

This article focuses on the role of concubinae in the Roman world, through analysis of inscriptions and reliefs on funerary monuments involving these women and their relatives. It investigates why concubinatus was chosen in preference to legal marriage, and how the concubina was perceived as a member of her partner's family. The results bring to light how this type of quasi-marital union was an appealing option for men of social standing, and that the role of concubinae accepted by their partners was not so dissimilar to that of legal wives. The article considers funerary monuments from Roman Italy, dating from the first century BC to the early third century AD. It deals with the role of Roman concubinae by analysing tombstones from both an archaeological and historical point of view; the aim of this analysis is to reconstruct a social pattern of concubinatus and of the individuals involved in this type of quasi-marital relationship, with the aid of two different types of ancient sources.

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.

This paper aims to advance scholarly understanding of the intellectual significance of Ovid's Fasti during the European Renaissance by examining a number of early modern poetic calendars modelled on the Ovidian poem. Recent studies of Ovid's Fasti have noted that the poem's propensity to contest the meaning of a particular occasion facilitates a sustained examination of the relationship between the past and present of Rome, through which the poet disrupts the reorganization of the Roman calendar by Augustus. This paper suggests that a similarly politically charged operation underpins a number of Renaissance fasti poems. Using these poems’ remembrance of the Sack of Rome (1527) as a case study, this article argues, firstly, that the genre's commemorative function is mobilized competitively by its early modern authors to reflect on the history and status of Rome, particularly the city's role as the caput mundi since antiquity. Secondly, it will be shown that in the second half of the sixteenth century the genre of calendrical poetry — and Ovid's Fasti in particular — became an important medium through which Renaissance humanists critiqued the nature of power at a time when political and ecclesiastical schisms hardened across Europe.

This paper discusses a drawing in the Lanciani collection representing the excavations of a tomb at the Vigna Casali in 1871–2. This tomb had a rich collection of antiquities, including important sarcophagi now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek. The drawing, which is wrongly catalogued as depicting the Vigna Casati, has not hitherto been connected with these finds. It was made on site by Francesco Patrizi (1826–1905), a supporter of contemporary painting, amateur artist, and owner of the Villa Patrizi not far away. This article correlates the information contained in the drawing with contemporary descriptions of the excavations and a measured drawing made for the Casali family at the time, in order to understand better what the site contained.

The two Anglican churches in Rome by the distinguished nineteenth-century English architect George Edmund Street — St Paul's Within-the-Walls (1872–6), Via Nazionale, and All Saints’ (1880–7), Via del Babuino — are notable examples of High Victorian design. Yet little scholarly attention has been afforded either church, especially All Saints’. This article considers both these buildings not so much as works of architecture but as markers of cultural intent in an environment (and age) fraught with political and religious tension and conflict. It seeks to understand them in the difficult and often fluid context of Risorgimento Italy out of which they emerged, including the city of Rome immediately following its capture by Italian national forces on 20 September 1870. The aim is to establish an interpretation of the two buildings that pays due attention to their political and religious agency. In so doing this article considers closely how architecture was understood as a mediating force in the struggle over politics and identity in the late nineteenth century. In taking a fresh look at the extant archival documentation, alternative possibilities are offered (and revealed) as to how we might further decode the significance of these beguiling if still largely misunderstood works of architecture.

Ephemeral architecture was the antithesis of the permanent buildings typical of the ‘Fascism of stone’, and yet many architects took advantage of this paradox to create an imaginary Rome. A widespread use of ephemeral structures was made around 1938, during the Mostra Augustea della Romanità and Hitler's state visit to Italy, in order to support a political programme that marked the totalitarian turn in the Fascist regime after the foundation of the empire and aimed at strengthening the alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Relying on methodologies of particular relevance to Roman art history and on various sources unknown to date, this paper investigates the relationships between ephemeral architecture and romanità. The case study is a monumental tribune built in via dei Trionfi that inevitably suffered a damnatio memoriae: a combination of classicizing and futuristic decorations, it looked back at ancient Rome and, at the same time, highlighted the Fascist regime's aspirations to might and modernity.

This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (June 2019 – June 2020) gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions, and newspaper reports.