New Geophysical and Archaeological Research on the Urban and Suburban Transformation of Roman Hispellum from the Site of the Villa Fidelia (Umbria, Italy) (15 min)

Presenters

Douglas Boin, Saint Louis University; and Letizia Ceccarelli, Politecnico di Milano

Abstract

This presentation disseminates the preliminary results from a new collaborative international research project at the ancient Roman city of Hispellum (modern Spello in Umbria, Italy, in the province of Perugia), a campaign conceived and undertaken by Saint Louis University to study the town’s transformation from pre-Roman times through the Middle Ages. A city of much importance across premodern history, Spello saw its local fortunes rise following the civil war between Octavian and Antony in the late first century B.C.E. It achieved lasting fame between 333–335 C.E. when the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine, granted its residents permission to organize shows and gladiatorial games as part of their festivities and to build an imperial cult temple in his honor, a building that has never definitively been located. Starting in 2021, with the collaboration of the British School at Rome and the Province di Perugia, the project conducted a geophysical survey of unexcavated areas in and around Spello’s expansive ancient hillside sanctuary, roughly occupying the grounds of the Renaissance-era Villa Fidelia, to learn more about the city’s extramural development. Based on the results of magnetometry and ground penetrating radar, which revealed subsurface architectural remains in the area consistent with the footprint of a large Roman-era building, on a plot of land measuring 15 m square at a depth of approximately 1.3 m, a campaign was organized in 2023 under the auspices of Italy’s Ministry of Culture to ground-test the geophysical data. This presentation summarizes the results of that work, which has revealed the foundations of a monumental, late Roman structure outside the Villa Fidelia underneath its adjacent car park. From these preliminary findings, the project hopes to make a new contribution to the study of urban and suburban change in central Italy during pre-Roman, Roman, and late Roman periods.

  AIA-2I