This report is a further contribution to the publication of the survey of the country surrounding Veii. The area is bounded in the north by the watershed of the Roman Via Clodia; on the east by the line of the Via Cassia, also a watershed; on the south by the Valle della Torre Spaccata and the stream it joins, the Fosso dell'Acquasona, to the latter's junction with the Fosso Galeria; and on the west by the river known from north to south as the Fosso di Cesano, Rio Galeria, Valle Galeria and Fosso Galeria. It is a compact area as the roads which originate in its north-east corner terminate within it, apart from the cross country Etruscan road which goes off across the Fosso Galeria towards the lower Arrone (Route I) and the Etruscan road down the long ridge to the Via di Boccea crossing of the Fosso Galeria (Route VI), neither of whose onward courses has yet been studied in detail. The Roman road down the last mentioned ridge may have been a useful link in local communication, but it was probably not a through road.

The plateau on which the site of Veii stands is bounded by the steeply eroded valleys of the Fosso Piordo and the Torrente Valchetta, the ancient river Cremera. A kilometre to the north-east of their confluence near the Piazza d'Armi, the site of the bath-house serving the Roman municipium Augustum Veiens was exposed by river erosion in November 1959 (fig. 1). It lies across the narrow floor of the Valchetta ravine, where the river has changed course frequently since classical times. The ancient approach probably lay along a small track leading from the edge of the main town plateau immediately above the baths. This choice of position, which certainly had pre-Roman associations, was determined by the presence of a number of hot springs which break through the valley floor at this point. They are the result of quiescent volcanic activity; another example occurred on the opposite side of Veii, in the Vignacce area of the Fosso Piordo.

The site was known to antiquarians of the last century. Canina mentions the baths briefly (p. 73) and reproduces an engraving of them (Tav. XX) in Antica cittá di Veio (1847), which presumably shows the outer shell of the building before the river broke into it (pl. XX, a). It illustrates a vital point in understanding the remains as they stand at present.

This paper examines the iconographic and archaeological evidence for chariot racing in Etruria, its context and audience. We then focus on the representation of the chariot crash — a motif pervasive in Etruscan art on a variety of locally-produced artistic media. The incongruous depiction of the most exciting, dangerous and tragic occurrence in the race alongside scenes of banqueting and dancing complicates our understanding of Etruscan tomb painting and of funeral ritual. Images of chariot crashes reveal an Etruscan appreciation for Greek epic, while also reflecting real details of the burial rite and the nature of élite competition.

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.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century the trade in antiques in Rome was largely in British hands. Matthew Brettingham the younger was only employed as the agent of Lord Orford, Lord Leicester, and Lord Egremont (Michaelis, Ancient Marbles, 71 sqq.); but another artist resident in Rome, Gavin Hamilton, served his patrons not merely by purchasing, but by excavating antiques for them in the neighbourhood of Rome; and his enterprise was rewarded by discoveries of great artistic importance, though later archaeologists would have been far more grateful to him had he registered more accurately the sites and circumstances of his researches, still more had he made anything like a plan of the buildings he examined. It has not, it is true, been as yet possible to control his results; for I do not believe that any site which he searched has ever been re-excavated subsequently.

This paper presents an innovative study of the port system of Rome in Imperial times through the application of an integrated approach to both archaeological analysis and material evidence. Specifically, it seeks to provide a more complete contextualization and understanding of the port system of Rome by focusing on the exploration of the physical geography of the river Tiber and its transformations in connection with the organization of the port system between the late first century BC and early third century AD. Methodologically, this study is based on the compilation, re-evaluation and analysis of published archaeological and geoarchaeological data and on the application of modelling and simulations techniques within a GIS environment. These foundations and means allow us to reconstruct the development of the river Tiber's historical course in antiquity and its impact on specific organizational aspects of Rome's port system. In this sense, this study provides new insights and avenues of research (applicable to other geographical areas and periods of time) to evaluate the system's changing capacity for transport and the potential existence of a signalling system, in contrast to previous hypotheses on the organization of river traffic along the Tiber.

This article considers the writings of Saint Jerome as a source for writing a cultural history of the city of Rome in late antiquity. Jerome is of course, in many respects, an unreliable witness but his lively and often conflicted accounts of the city do none the less provide significant insights into the city during an age of transition. He provides a few snippets for the scholar of topography, but these do not constitute the main attraction. Jerome's city of Rome appears above all as a textual palimpsest: variously painted in Vergilian colours as Troy and frequently compared with the biblical cities of Babylon, Bethlehem and Jerusalem. In the final analysis, it is argued, Jerome's Rome is surprisingly unstable, indeed a ‘soft city’.

This paper analyses the manuscripts of Diego de Revillas in the British School at Rome Library regarding the Severan marble plan and its arrangement in the Capitoline Museum, in 1742. They offer some insight into how this much discussed work was undertaken by Giovanni Battista Nolli, under the supervision of Alessandro Gregorio Capponi and Revillas. Specifically, Revillas’ documents throw new light on the way the scale reduction of the Forma Urbis was (incorrectly) figured out.

In 2010, the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies achieved its centenary. In 2012, the British School at Rome, which was closely linked to the origins of the Roman Society, celebrates the centenary of its Royal Charter. This marked the formal establishment of the distinctively broad and interdisciplinary remit of the School by the inclusion of humanities, art and architecture in a single institution. The combination of these two anniversaries has given rise to this attempt to think through some of the paths that Roman studies have taken, and to understand them within the context of broader developments in particularly British and Italian historiography. The Roman Society and the British School at Rome have many points of connection, both in terms of individuals and in terms of research interest. Recent work on the development of a British historical tradition has shown that it remains important to ground the reading of historical scholarship within the intellectual trajectory of its practitioners. This is, therefore, an argument about how the research represented in the Journal of Roman Studies, and conducted at the British School at Rome, and ultimately more widely, should be seen in a historiographical context.

There can be little doubt that down to the beginning of the Early Iron Age the greater part of the Ager Veientanus, in common with the adjoining territories, was still covered by the primeval forest of which the Ciminian Forest of early Roman history was the still-considerable surviving remnant. There were doubtless trails through the forest, and the activities of hunters and charcoal burners would account for sporadic finds of stone implements (in so far as these have been correctly identified as of Neolithic or Bronze Age date). But the main centres of settlement at this early date lay elsewhere, along or near the coast and a few of the larger river valleys. One of these was, inevitably, the Tiber itself; another the river Fiora and the uplands around Lake Bolsena, forming a link between the coast and the middle valley of the Tiber. Outside these clearly defined areas of settlement the prehistoric archaeological record is largely a blank.

Many of the wars of the Late Republican period were largely civil conflicts, and there was thus a tension between the traditional expectation that triumphs should be celebrated for victories over foreign enemies and the need of the great commanders to give full expression to their prestige and charisma, and to legitimate their power. Most of the rules and conventions relating to triumphs thus appear to have been articulated as the development of Roman warfare brought new issues to the Senate's attention. This paper will examine these tensions and the ways in which they were resolved. The traditional war-ritual of the triumph and the topic of civil war have both received renewed interest in recent scholarship. However, attempts to define the relationship between them have been hampered by comments in the ancient evidence that suggest the celebration of a triumph for victory in a civil war was contrary to traditional practices. Nevertheless, as this paper will argue, a general could expect to triumph after a civil war victory if it could be represented also as over a foreign enemy (the civil war aspect of the victory did not have to be denied); only after a victory in an exclusively civil war was this understood to be in breach of traditional practices.

A recently published history of naval power and trade in the Mediterranean in the early medieval period provides a reminder of that vital but little-explored change in the balance of maritime power which preceded the Crusades and of the movement which won back for the Christians of the West, Sardinia, Sicily, and Malta, threatened the shores of Africa and Albania, and was both a rehearsal and an essential preliminary for the great Drang nach Osten which was to follow. Little is known of the shipping used in these operations or of the tactics employed, but an attempt has been made to investigate the scanty sources for the Norman naval operations in the early stages of their conquest of southern Italy and Sicily, not merely because some of these operations were important in their immediate results, but also as an example of the naval technique of the Latin Christian military commanders in southern Europe. The subject derives additional interest from the spectacle it affords of Vikings finding their sea-legs again after many decades as farmers and cavalrymen in Normandy. It also offers one explanation for the conquest of the considerable area of southern Italy and Sicily by a comparatively small force, and once again demonstrates the eclecticism and adaptability of the Normans.