A short note published in 1925 in the Bullettino di Paletnologia Italiana (vol. xlv, p. 153) briefly recorded the discovery of prehistoric material during quarrying for gypsum near Ariano five years previously. A footnote to an article by Rellini three years later was a little more explicit. The finds, from collapsed caves at the foot of a hill, were largely of the Apennine Culture of the Bronze Age with some painted Neolithic ware. The same statement is repeated almost word for word in Rellini's La Più Antica Ceramica Dipinta in Italia, p. 75. Then in 1950, in an article on the prehistoric collections in the Museo Nazionale di Napoli, Buchner wrote a short paragraph which attracted far less attention than it deserved. It recorded that in material sent in from the quarry between 1920 and 1938 impressed and scratched neolithic pottery was also present.

Pyrgi, cittadina etrusca e colonia romana, posta sulle coste del Tirreno fra Roma e Civitavecchia, fu visitata e descritta da molti archeologi e topografi del secolo scorso, ma non é stata oggetto di studi topografici recenti. Queste brevi note vogliono illustrare con maggior precisione alcuni punti fondamentali della sua topografia. La ricerca é stata molto facilitata dall'uso delle fotografie aeree esistenti nella Scuola Britannica, una delle quali ripresa nel maggio 1944 é qui riprodotta (pl. III; cfr. fig. 1, dove indichiamo gli elementi ricavati dalla fotografia o accertati sul terreno e, a trattini, le linee fondamentali della topografia moderna).

Sul luogo di Pyrgi esiste oggi il castello di Santa Severa (pl. IV, a) al quale conduce una breve strada che si distacca dall'Aurelia al chilometro 52,550. Un recinto medievale di fortificazione con piccole torri sporgenti, costruito in blocchetti quadrangolari di arenaria, fa capo ad un'alta rocca quadrilatera con torri ai quattro angoli. Separate da essa e collegato solamente con un aereo ponte di legno é il torrione maestro cilindrico, in posizione dominante sulla riva del mare.

Una memoria del martirio di Santa Severa si legge negli Acta Sanctorum 29 gennaio vol. ii, p. 946 sg. dove si hanno le seguenti determinazioni topografiche: Centumcellae, milliario XXXV ab urbe iuxta mare … in loco qui dicitur Pignus.

The Via Valeria is the central section of the great highway which in antiquity connected Rome with the Adriatic coast at Ostia Aterni (now Pescara). The first section, the Via Tiburtina, has been described by Thomas Ashby with his usual thoroughness (PBSR, iii, 1906, p. 84 ff.). The third section, the Via Claudia Valeria (Collarmele-Pescara) has been dealt with in more summary fashion by Robert Gardner (PBSR, ix, 1920, p. 75 ff.). The central section has never been described.

The present paper does not intend to compete with Ashby's monumental achievement, the result of a life-time dedicated to work on the ground and in archives. It is intended only to present a straight-forward account of the surviving remains, based on personal survey over the whole length of the section discussed. I have also added extracts from Ashby's and Miss Van Deman's works on the Roman aqueducts giving the modern numbering of the road, for the use of those who wish to check them; I myself had no opportunity to do so.

The reconstruction of the course of this ancient road is very instructive as regards the behaviour of modern and earlier traffic systems, the more so since the railway everywhere accompanies it. A section along the Via Valeria Antica would show it as a series of steps.

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.

The modern Via Cassia, now as in antiquity the great arterial road up through the heart of south-eastern Etruria, after crossing the Fosso dell'Olgiata less than a kilometre to the west of the north-western gate of Veii, climbs steadily for about 7 km. to cross the Monti Sabatini, the line of extinct volcanic craters that runs eastwards from Lake Bracciano, forming a natural northern boundary to the Roman Campagna. After cutting through the southern crest of the crater of Baccano, with its magnificent views southwards and eastwards over Rome towards Tivoli, Palestrina and the Alban Hills, the road drops into the crater, skirts round the east side of the former lake, and climbs again to the far rim, before dropping once more into the head of the Treia basin, on its way to Monterosi and Sutri.

From this vantage-point a whole new landscape is spread out before one (pl. XLVII). To the west and north-west, the tangle of volcanic hills that forms the northern limit of the Monti Sabatini, rising at its highest point to the conical peak of Monte Rocca Romana (612 m.); beyond and to the right of those, past Monterosi and filling the whole of the north-western horizon, some 10–15 km. distant, the spreading bulk of Monte Cimino (1053 m.), with its characteristically volcanic, twin-peaked profile; to the north and north-east, the gently rolling woods and fields of the Faliscan plain, deceptively smooth, stretching away to the distant Tiber.