This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (primarily in 2013, but also in the first part of 2014), gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions and newspaper reports.

It is one of the saddest losses of history that of Antioch and Alexandria, two of the great early centres of Christian art and learning, hardly a stone should now be standing above ground. Of the two, Alexandria is in the worse case. Antioch can at least boast the magnificent series of mosaics unearthed before the war by the Princeton Expedition. At Alexandria on the other hand there is little chance that excavation can ever reveal any substantial remains of the classical city, which was ruthlessly destroyed in the last century to make way for the expansion of its modern successor; and whereas in the case of the minor arts the contribution of Alexandria to the contemporary art of the Mediterranean, whether in its relation to the Byzantine world or to the nascent Coptic art of Upper Egypt, can at least be usefully discussed in the light of surviving ivories, textiles, manuscript illustrations, and the like, in the field of architecture and of architectural ornament any such enquiry is hampered by a vacuum at the heart of the problem. The questions so well defined by Kitzinger in regard to Coptic sculpture are capable of wider application.

The excavations carried on during the years 1884–1890 by the late Lord Savile (then Sir Savile Lumley) at Civita Lavinia in Latium, yielded a large number of objects which have never been fully described. In the reports published by the excavator a short account of the work is given, from which it is plain that the two chief sites excavated were the ‘Royal Villa’ and the Temple of Juno Lavinia. A description and a few illustrations are there published of objects from both these sites, but nothing in the nature of a complete catalogue exists, and the purpose of this paper is merely to supply a first instalment of such a catalogue. I hope to complete the work in one or two subsequent volumes of these Papers.

The deliberate, senseless destruction of the documents belonging to the Grande Archivio di Stato of Naples is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, single crime against history committed by the German army during the late war. The circumstances and the results of the act which reduced to ashes this vast collection of records of Southern Italy, covering more than a thousand years, are not as widely known among scholars, much less the general public, as they should be, and they seem therefore to call for some brief account in order to explain the reason of the present publication. Evacuated because of the dangers of air-warfare over Naples from the Archivio to the Villa Montesano near to S. Paolo Belsito some thirty kilometres away, and packed for the most part into 866 solid cases, this priceless treasure of over 30,000 MS. volumes and 50,000 documents under the charge of a keeper of Archives remained undiscovered by the German command until the Allied troops were already approaching.

On 28 September, 1943, however, a foraging party came to the Villa in search of calves wanted for food and found instead cases of records stored for safety. Next morning an officer accompanied by a single soldier arrived; he ordered one of the chests to be opened and carefully inspected the volumes packed within. After the purely historical nature of the deposit had been explained to him and its immense importance from this point of view, he professed himself satisfied and departed.

This article examines textual descriptions of smiling, laughing and joking with the pope in thirteenth-century Rome. It focuses on two Anglo-Norman accounts of conducting litigation at the papal curia: Thomas of Marlborough's (d.1236) Chronicon abbatiae de Evesham and Gerald of Wales's (c. 1146–1220×23) De jure et statu Menevensis ecclesiae. Both authors include several careful and prominent references to smiling, laughing and joking, and specifically in relation to Pope Innocent III. These passages have previously been read as straightforward examples of wit and friendship, but this study shows that the authors use these physiological expressions to convey complex and subtly different pictures of the papal curia. Above all, this article demonstrates how Thomas and Gerald's descriptions of humorous interactions with the pope play crucial narrative and mnemonic roles within their work.

The Colosseum is well understood as a dynastic monument that was key to the Flavian building programme and to Flavian ideology. From this point of view it has been approached as the fulfilment of Augustus's ambition for a large-scale amphitheatre, as serving to diminish Nero's memory as it was constructed on the atrium of his dismantled Golden House, and as a victory monument built with the spoils of the Jewish War. One important political aspect of this dynastic monument has been largely overlooked: its connection with emperor worship. Outside Rome, it is well known that amphitheatres served as a venue for the procession and placement of imperial cult images; in Rome, the Circus Maximus and the theatres were venues for the display of imperial images and attributes brought in during their respective pompae. Through the deployment of textual, topographical and visual evidence, this article demonstrates that the Colosseum also had a pulvinar that displayed images and attributes of the gods and divi brought in during the pompa. The location of the pulvinar and the mechanisms by which it was serviced are explored, as are the ideological implications of cultic activity in the Colosseum.

The construction date of the ‘Servian’ wall and its layout in the riverside area between the Aventine and the Capitol are the two main questions addressed in this article. The interlocking topographical problems were addressed in 1988 by Filippo Coarelli, whose interpretation has become the generally accepted orthodoxy. But not all the difficulties have been solved, and with Coarelli's recent return to the subject a fresh examination of the evidence may be helpful. Careful attention is given here to stories of early Rome that involve the walls and gates, as reported in Livy, Dionysius and Plutarch; they are not, of course, taken as authentic evidence for the time of the alleged events, but as indicating what was taken for granted when the stories were first composed. New suggestions are made about a revision of the line of the city wall in 212 BC and the consequent restructuring of two important gates, the Porta Carmentalis and the Porta Trigemina; the mysterious ‘Porta Triumphalis’ is discussed separately in an appendix.

Of late years it would appear that the subject of Papal Iconography has been singularly neglected; nor as far as we are aware has the subject been at all exhaustively treated in any monograph. Yet if its claim to importance calls for justification, it should suffice to quote the following passage in which J. A. Symonds records the impression made upon him by the busts of the Popes (Fig. I) which adorn the walls of the Duomo of Siena:

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.

Nonostante le visite di Tiberio a Capri siano state documentate estensivamente dagli autori antichi, e molti siti romani siano ancora visitabili sull'isola, la sua storia imperiale dopo Tiberio rimane largamente sconosciuta. Molta attenzione è stata riservata alle dodici ville che si suppone siano state costruite dall'imperatore, delle quali solo una manciata è stata identificata con sicurezza; ma nessuna fase principale di costruzione è stata attribuita ad un periodo più tardo della tradizionale fase augusteatiberiana. Allo stesso modo, nessun'altra visita da parte di altri imperatori è stata ricordata dalle fonti letterarie, nonostante l'esilio della moglie di Commodo e della sorella dall'imperatore stesso indichi almeno che l'isola rimase un possesso imperiale. Inoltre essa continuò ad essere associata esclusivamente a Tiberio dagli studiosi antichi fino al V secolo d.C. Per dare un senso ai dati frammentari pertinenti al destino di Capri dopo la morte di Tiberio, questo articolo considera le fonti epigrafiche riguardanti l'attivita imperiale sull'isola. L'esistenza di un'unica informazione su un gruppo di schiavi imperiali che una volta servivano sull'isola offrono una prospettiva su un evento eccezionale nell'organizzazione della casa imperiale, probabilmente da datarsi alla prima parte del regno di Claudio, che influenzò l'ulteriore storia imperiale dell'isola.

This paper discusses the survey evidence from the Orientalizing and Archaic settlement and funerary sites at Nepi (ancient Nepet), one of the first Latin colonies outside Latium adiectum. The comparison of its pre-Roman, pre-colonial developments to the Roman patterns from the Nepi Survey Project and the trends from other Latin colonies in southern Etruria allows the examination of the local effects of Roman colonialism. The evidence shows that Nepi seemed to develop as an independent city state in the Orientalizing period, peaked in the Archaic period and weakened before the capture of Veii in 396 bc, making it easier to defeat. Rural settlement all but disappeared afterwards with similar hiatus apparent at the sister colony at Sutri as well. In the third century bc the first few villas near the town appeared as a sign of the establishment of a Roman settlement pattern. The extensive ‘rural colonization’ at Nepi, similarly to Sutri and Cosa, started only in the second century bc when all southern Etruria had entered a colonial phase and could develop alongside Rome. Thus, Latin colonization disrupted earlier patterns and the colonies appear to have been originally outposts set up to secure new territory.