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I have lived inside the boundaries of what used to be the Roman empire for my entire life. Born in Rotterdam in The Netherlands, I grew up in Brabant, in the south of the country, and went to the university in Nijmegen, where they were still excavating the legionary camp as I arrived in 1995 […]

En toen, in november 2004, behaagde het Hare Majesteit de Koningin om naar de Via Omero te komen. Het Nederlands Instituut te Rome werd een eeuw oud, en mocht zich vanaf dat moment Koninklijk gaan noemen. Het leidde tot bijzondere taferelen: daar stonden we dan, in de zaal waar we normaal onze presentaties hielden, en […]

Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem. Excavations in 1934 unearthed late antique mosaics possibly belonging to the original church built under (and by) the Roman emperor Constantine in the early fourth century.

Here we are on the other side of the Alps, outside the Mediterranean, where things worked differently. This greyish-black vase from ca. 500 BC is decorated with geometric patterns (stamped) and an animal-frieze (hand-drawn). It was found in Matzhausen, which is northeast of Regensburg in Bavaria, and belongs to the early La Tène-culture.

This sixth century BCE pyxis probably comes from Corinth and  currently belongs to the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Note how the decoration uses three different colours (background yellow, black and dark red) combining geometrical patterns with mythological animals and floral motifs – typically for its time, there is a tendency to fill up all ’empty’ space […]

Despite the spectacular new excavations that are currently unfolding in the northern part of the city, the most significant discovery at Pompeii in recent decades was made just over a year ago, outside the main southern city gate, where a  large and well-preserved funerary monument was dug up alongside the road that probably connected Pompeii […]

Pompeii, House of the Tragic Poet. This is the back wall of a luxury dining room in the garden area of this house; the paintings date to the last decades of Pompeii’s existence (AD 50-79). The central panel-picture features a scene identified as Theseus leaving Ariadne behind at Naxos.

At the small, Hellenistic hilltop town of Solunto, on Sicily, the road leading to the small agora of the city started off with a regular paving of rectangular blocks, but for the last 100 meters, it had been embellished by a pavement of bricks laid with all kinds of geometrical patterns. It is one of the […]

This is Corinth, which was, of course, an ancient Greek city, but in its excavated form mostly goes back to the period after the Roman foundation of a colony: the Greek city was smashed to pieces by the Roman army in 146 BC. The excavations have mainly focused on the forum but they have included […]

This is the central road of the Roman city of Grumentum,  close to the point where it enters the city’s forum (I was standing with my back to the plaza when I took this picture). Well-paved, it was probably about the most intensively used street-section in the city, and wheeled traffic clearly has left its mark on […]