The project to restore and improve access to the Mausoleum of Augustus has been a long drawn out affair.Footnote ¹ Following the announcement of the Urbs et Civitas scheme in 2009, works were held up and the expected reopening for the commemoration of the bimillennium of Augustus’ death in 2014 postponed.Footnote ² After operations recommenced in 2016, the site briefly reopened to the public in December 2020, enabling visitors to chart the progress. The tomb's central spaces, with the epitaphs and urn bases scattered among collapsed vaulting and 1930s concrete underpinning, remain as they were in 2009. But the planned exhibition spaces in the upper sectors of the concamerationes have been installed (if not yet filled): the long climb to the upper levels enables one vividly to appreciate the mausoleum's sheer height, and the vast space it encloses. The area outside the monument, where new ramps are being constructed to give access from the modern street level, is still a building site. A singular late antique structure is now visible at the border of the excavated area, to the right of the tomb's original entrance, and at a much higher level: a narrow apsed hall built of opus vittatum that looks no earlier than the fourth century AD.Footnote ³

All of this activity has led to one remarkable and unexpected discovery. During works on a new sewer not far from the apse of S. Carlo ai Catinari, a cippus belonging to Claudius’ pomerium was unearthed in its original position, still fixed in the ground.Footnote ⁴ This is the first such find in over a century and adds to the corpus of nine other Claudian pomerium cippi known to date.Footnote ⁵ The last four lines of the familiar formula are partially preserved, with the characteristic digamma known from other versions: ------ / [C]ENSOR [PP] / [AV]CTIS POPVLI RO[MA]NI / FINIBVS POMERIVM / AMPLIAℲIT TERMINAℲITQℲE. The exact route of the boundary in the northern sector of the city, and especially its relation to the Via Flaminia and the river, remain poorly understood. The location of the new stone (which would leave the Mausoleum, as one might expect, outside the sacred boundary) confirms that Claudius’ line ran to the west of the Via Flaminia, but the full course of the pomerium through the Campus Martius remains something of an enigma.Footnote ⁶ The new cippus was lifted from its ancient site and immediately placed on show in the adjacent Ara Pacis Museum.

A two-day online conference held in honour of Emilio Rodríguez Almeida at the Spanish School was dedicated to the archaeology and topography of the area between the Quirinal and Campus Martius.Footnote ⁷ The great topographer was remembered in papers by Francesca De Caprariis and Daniela Cavallo. In addition to such topics as hydrogeology, general topography, and surveys of past finds of roads, aqueducts and houses, there were notices of new excavations. Antonio Pizzo provided fresh information on the remains discovered beneath the buildings of the Escuela in via di S. Eufemia.Footnote ⁸ The fragmentary structure previously identified as an Augustan columbarium now appears to be a secondary phase of an earlier tomb of tufa and travertine, perhaps dating to the early first century BC. The chief acquisition was the discovery of an earlier structure composed of blocks of grotta oscura tufa. The initial hypothesis that this represents a terracing wall of the Quirinal was subsequently updated in a communication published on the website of the Escuela, proposing to identify it as a trace of the Servian Wall, dating to the fourth century BC.Footnote ⁹ Discoveries on via IV Novembre were illustrated by Simone Barbieri, Marta Baumgartner and Francescopaolo di Sabato. At largo Magnanapoli, in a trench for roadworks directly in front of the Torre delle Milizie, a disturbed burial was encountered, together with fragments of black glaze pottery and ashes, perhaps belonging to a funerary bed. Further down the hill, investigations were carried out beneath the pavement of S. Maria del Carmine. It was found that the building, which dates to the early seventeenth century with extensive later remodelling, is built directly over a series of square brick chambers dating to the Severan period, the upper sections of which had been used for the burial vaults of the church. As yet, only the upper sectors of the chambers, which are cut by the church floor at the level of the springing of the vaults, have been excavated.

The excavations beneath the former Banca Nazionale di Lavoro in piazza Albania on the Aventine, mentioned in previous ‘Notes’, have been opened to the public in a virtual reality display similar to that adopted for the houses beneath palazzo Valentini near the Column of Trajan.Footnote ¹⁰ The site is a large domus of second-century date situated just within the still standing section of the Servian Walls in via di S. Anselmo. Five rooms are visible from a raised walkway, each with mosaic pavements. Frescoed dividing walls, in the rarely surviving technique of pisé, stand to a height of over one metre. The house underwent as many as five changes in decor during the one hundred and fifty years between its construction during the reign of Trajan and its abandonment, perhaps due to subsidence, in the third century. Earlier phases of the pavements have been lifted, restored, and mounted on the walls of the exhibition space. One features a fragment of an inscription, also in mosaic, naming three benefactors, perhaps pertaining to a club house or collegium. Of the levels encountered beneath the house, a fragmentary structure in small blocks of tufa survives which may have something to do with the nearby Republican city defences. Whilst the site's full publication progresses, an excellent preliminary volume, serving at once as guidebook and finds list, has been published.Footnote ¹¹

Another little-known site, this time in the suburbs, has been opened to the public. The construction over the last fifteen years of the new residential quarter of Lucrezia Romana, situated at Capannelle just to the south of the Park of the Aqueducts, has revealed a great deal of archaeological information running from the prehistoric period to at least the third century AD. As mentioned in 2015, the new quarter is home to a small Antiquarium containing material found between the fourth and twelfth miles of the Via Latina.Footnote ¹² Just before the pandemic, the excavations of a Republican paved road (so-called Via Castrimiense), flanked by an interesting assemblage of tombs, a villa, and multi-phase hydraulic structures relating to the nearby aqueducts, were arranged as a public park, entered from the new via Paul Cezanne.Footnote ¹³ Nearby, and to the east, a portion of the Via Latina has been uncovered next to an imposing Antonine mausoleum: these remains, too, may be visited in a new public park, situated between vie del Casale Ferranti and Mario Broglio.Footnote ¹⁴

The museums of the Comune di Roma have been enriched by finds both old and new. The Museo dei Fori Imperiali unveiled recently discovered sculpture from the excavations of the Forum of Trajan in via Alessandrina which had already yielded the colossal head of Dionysius mentioned in past ‘Notes’.Footnote ¹⁵ Found in the fill of the same late medieval foundation walls were an equally large (43 cm) head of a youthful Augustus and more than sixty fragments of friezes depicting arms, trophies and captive Dacians.Footnote ¹⁶ At the Capitoline Museums, the missing index finger from the colossal bronze hand of the emperor Constantine was reattached with great ceremony in April 2021. The piece was rediscovered in 2018 by researchers at the Louvre (where it was catalogued as a toe), whose holdings it had entered with the purchase of the collection of Giampietro Campana in 1861. After a successful match was made using a resin replica of the piece, an accord between the two museums enabled the bronze to be returned to Rome and the 38-cm digit was reattached before the waiting press on 28 April, the technicians’ anti-covid masks giving the occasion a suitably surgical air. How the fragment came into the possession of Campana is not known, but he presumably acquired it after it had passed through the collections of the great families sometime between the donation of Sixtus IV in 1471 and 1539/40, when the hand appears already missing its fingertips in an engraving by Francisco de Hollanda.Footnote ¹⁷

The long-awaited exhibition of the Torlonia marbles finally opened in October 2020. After further interruptions due to the reintroduction of a nationwide lockdown, the show was extended to January 2022.Footnote ¹⁸ Visitors had the opportunity to see ninety-two of the collection's c.620 pieces, arranged thematically in the newly adapted ground floor of the Villa Caffarelli. The display illustrated the sculptures’ collection history, running in a reverse chronology from those unearthed by the Torlonia themselves (Portus relief, Vulci girl, Attic votive relief from the Villa of Herodes Atticus) to those first recorded in the great collections of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Cesi vase, Athena Cesarini). Most illuminating was the opportunity to see the statues purchased from the Giustiniani as one, arranged in the exhibition's single large hall. There was some criticism of the display – the monotonous grey bases, intended to evoke the Capitoline temple, reminded one reviewer of a crematorium, and the crowded, miniature spaces made another feel claustrophobic; there were complaints of “overly zealous cleaning and lighting”.Footnote ¹⁹ All of this recalls Lanciani, in the original ‘Notes from Rome’, who filed his own review of the first Torlonia exhibition in July 1880. He found the modest sub-division of the spaces using simple coloured curtains ingenious, but also had something to say about the exhibits’ modern restoration, “carried to such an excess that the question is no more a question of aesthetics, it amounts almost to imposition which has no excuse”.Footnote ²⁰

The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Roma Capitale (the unification of Italy with Rome as its capital city) was commemorated by an exhibition at the Museo di Roma. As well as graphic and cinematic material relating to the arts, industry and political events, the displays included a section on the institution of the Commissione Archeologica di Roma and its early archaeological investigations in the new capital. The original watercolours produced by Cicconetti for John Henry Parker's studies of the Aurelianic Walls were displayed, as well as the astonishingly detailed archaeological map of the entire Esquiline, drawn up in twenty large plates by Costantino Sneider.Footnote ²¹ An exhibition on Pompeii at the Colosseum unexpectedly included an innovative reconstruction of Third Style marble revetment from the ancient deposit discovered in the domus del Gianicolo and hypothetically attributed to the horti of Agrippina.Footnote ²² The most interesting exhibition relating to the archaeology of Rome took place with very little fanfare at the Montemartini Museum. “Colori dei Romani” featured little known mosaics from the Capitoline collections, discovered during the great urban excavations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many of which had not been displayed since the demise of the ill-fated Antiquarium Comunale in 1939.Footnote ²³ In addition to small fragments of emblemata from largely unknown houses at S. Lucia in Selci and SS. Pietro e Marcellino, entire decorative ensembles from the celebrated Basilica Hilariana on the Caelian and the Quirinal domus of the Claudii were exhibited, with the sculpture, statue bases and inscriptions placed alongside the apotropaic evil eye of the former and showcasing the latter's dramatic polychrome harbour scene.Footnote ²⁴