It is often said that you can’t repair a water main, break ground for a parking garage or dig up a potato in Rome without finding a treasure.

The roots of the Eternal City, which just celebrated its 2,762nd birthday, go deep and are still being unearthed. When first plumbed in the 16th century, the layer cake underneath the city yielded classical artifacts that helped inform the Renaissance. Almost as inevitably as yellow mimosas bloom in the spring, archaeologists keep coming here, wrangling excavation permits and opening trenches. Passersby see red-and-white-striped plastic tape and piles of dirt, but rarely learn what is being sought in the rubble, because when a dig yields an important find, it takes years of negotiation, fundraising, preservation, public-access construction and scholarly interpretation to open a site to visitors.

As a resident, I often pass excavation sites and wonder what is going on. I got a chance to find out last fall when I visited a dig in Aqueduct Park, on the southeastern side of the city, where an ancient water conduit makes a broad bend on its way into the capital. Since 2006, when the American Institute for Roman Culture began an archaeological dig, the park has yielded treasures: intricately worked mosaics, the head of a god thought to be Zeus and structural evidence of a 1st or 2nd century bathing complex larger and more sophisticated than any yet found in the area immediately surrounding Rome.

Records identify it as the site of the Villa delle Vignacce, owned during Imperial Roman times by brick manufacturer Quintus Servilius Pudens. It is unclear whether the multistory bathhouse, with its intact Roman saunas, was part of a private villa or a public complex. In either case, the site calls into question long-held concepts about the configuration of Imperial Rome. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Antiquities, Archeology, dig, excavate, Quintus Servilius Pudens, Roman Archeology, Rome, Rome Italy, treasure, Villa delle Vignacce