Articles by Barbara Belelli Marchesini

The study of the urban alignment of the settlement of Pyrgi and of the arrangement of the sacred areas was favoured by its abandonment after the phase of Romanization and by the possibility of performing large-scale research over its territory. The harbour and the sanctuary of Pyrgi were a fundamental pole of attraction for foreign haunters as the outpost of the metropolis of Caere. Their development was strictly linked to Pyrgi’s favourable geographical position along the Tyrrhenian maritime routes and to the presence of a water spring. The settlement was founded at the end of the 7th century BC, and was connected to Caere by means of a large road. The excavations conducted since 1957 by the Sapienza University of Rome next to the terminal section of the Caere-Pyrgi road brought to light a large sacred district. The new excavation area (2009-2016) is located in the district between the sanctuary and the settlement. It includes different buildings datable to 600 BC-4th century BC erected along a pebbled road that departs from Caere-Pyrgi and leads towards the harbour. The buildings, together with votive deposits and a fire-altar, outline a residential quarter that was perhaps attended by a priesthood, where ceremonial practices were also performed. The new evidence can be related to the sanctuary itself and sheds light on its overall organisation. The results of recent fieldwork have also contributed to a better understanding of Pyrgi’s urban alignment, possible defensive systems (suggested by the Greek name Pyrgoi) and the topographic relationship with the later Roman maritime colony. Thanks to the involvement of scholars from different disciplinary fields, wide-range research is being carried out to reconstruct the original landscape and the evolution of the coastline, with an aim to determining the morphology of the coast and the harbour in the Etruscan period.

The III municipality (formerly the IV) of Rome, ever since the 1970’s, has been archaeologically documented in a particularly intensive way by the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Roma (SSBAR) in collaboration with a range of Italian and foreign scholars and institutes. This has resulted in an invaluable corpus of analogue and digital data archived by the SSBAR that is now being brought together in a single spatial database on protohistoric and Roman to medieval settlement and land use features, called SITAR. In this paper the contributors discuss the genesis, workings and actual state of SITAR, highlighting the cases of the Roman villa complex of Vigna Chiari or ‘di Faonte’ and the protohistoric settlements of Fidenae and Crustumerium, the latter serving as an example of collaboration between SSBAR and a foreign institute, in this particular case the Groningen Institute of Archaeology of the University of Groningen.