← Back to the mapGeneral view of the ancient Roman port city ruins at Ostia Antica
Modern photograph of the Ostia Antica archaeological site · Wikimedia Commons

Ostia Antica

Italia · Roman province·Italy·Founded ~350 BCE (castrum)

Rome's port at the mouth of the Tiber, at its commercial peak under Trajan.

An uninhabited archaeological park near Rome's Fiumicino airport; no modern town overlies it, so the ancient street grid, warehouses, and theatre are fully walkable.

Excavation history

1802-1805
Giuseppe Petrini (under Pope Pius VII) — Early papal-era digging around the Capitolium, the Round Temple, the Basilica, and the Forum baths, done without scientific method.
1855-1870
Pietro Ercole Visconti and Carlo Ludovico Visconti (under Pope Pius IX) — Excavations aimed mainly at recovering inscriptions, statues, mosaics, and paintings, many of which were carried off to the Vatican and Lateran museums.
1907
Dante Vaglieri — Began the first truly scientific, stratigraphy-conscious excavation of Ostia, systematically clearing the north-east part of the city using a small Decauville railway to remove spoil.
1924-1942
Guido Calza (with architect Italo Gismondi) — Directed excavation that, under a rushed push by Mussolini for the 1942 Rome world's fair, more than doubled the excavated area of the city; Gismondi produced the site's first topographic survey, published in 1954.

Notable finds

Statue of Trajan
Recovered from the Schola del Traiano, Ostia's guild hall for the shipbuilders, this full-length statue shows the emperor dressed as a general rather than a magistrate — a reminder that Ostia's wealth ran on the fleets that fed Rome.
Museo Ostiense, Ostia Antica
Perseus with the Head of Medusa
A Flavian-Hadrianic sculptor gave Ostia's Perseus a moment of theatrical stillness, the hero holding Medusa's severed head at arm's length exactly as he does in the Greek myth he's copied from.
Museo Ostiense, Ostia Antica
Sarcophagus with Scenes from the Iliad
Sarcophagus with Scenes from the Iliad
Carved around 160 CE for a burial in the Pianabella necropolis south of the city walls, this marble sarcophagus wraps its lid in a running frieze of Trojan War battle scenes lifted straight from Homer.
Museo Ostiense, Ostia Antica
Sarcophagus of the Muses
Looters were closing in on this marble sarcophagus at the Isola Sacra necropolis in 2008 when Italy's finance police intervened, recovering it intact with its carved procession of the nine Muses gathered around Athena.
Museo Ostiense, Ostia Antica
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