Daniella Santoro originally thought the grave marker in her yard was a massive rock. Photo / Susann Lusnia, via The Washington Post
Daniella Santoro and her husband were clearing underbrush from the backyard of their New Orleans home in March when they stumbled on a mystery that spanned continents and centuries.
What they first thought was a massive rock turned out to be the gravestone of a Roman soldier: Sextus Congenius Verus, a Thracian who sailed aboard the warship Asclepius before dying at age 42 - 1900 years ago.
The couple eventually learned that the stone had been missing from an Italian museum since the building was bombed in World War II.
But Santoro knew none of that history when she stumbled on the weathered stone.
At first she feared it might be an indication that her home was built on an unmarked African American cemetery - not uncommon for the historically black neighbourhood of Carrollton. So she began asking neighbours and colleagues whether they had come across anything similar.
One of those neighbours pointed Santoro to Ryan Gray, a University of New Orleans archaeologist who works with the Preservation Resource Centre of New Orleans. Gray is the one New Orleanians call when they think they’ve discovered something important.
“I often end up with questions about odd things from people in their yards,” he said.
Gray said Santoro first contacted him March 26, and he was able to quickly determine that her stone wasn’t the grave marker of an African American or former enslaved person.
“I knew that the Latin was far outside my Latin ability. I did Latin in high school and forgot most of it,” he said, so he contacted an Austrian colleague with Roman expertise who determined this was probably the marker of Sextus.
About the same time, Santoro - an anthropologist at Tulane University - emailed a photo of her discovery to a Latin-speaking professor in the classics department.
The colleague, Susann Lusnia, was floored.
“When I looked at the image, I was like, ‘This looks like a genuine Roman inscription,’” Lusnia, who teaches classical archaeology, said last week.
It almost didn’t seem real, Lusnia said - especially because the email came on April 1.
But the stone’s inscription had telltale signs of a Roman grave marker, with tightly spaced letters stylised in a manner typical for the time. Her translation of the Latin confirmed as much.
Lusnia said the inscription was basically a curriculum vitae of Sextus, including his tribe and military post.
She said she then plugged the inscription into an online database of ancient European epitaphs and discovered something startling.
The grave marker was listed as “missing” from the National Archaeological Museum of Civitavecchia, a port city about 55km west of Rome - and 8690km east of New Orleans.
“I would never have expected to see anything like this in a backyard in New Orleans,” Lusnia said.
Santoro quickly agreed the stone had to go back home, Lusnia said.
That began months of research. In another stroke of fate, Lusnia already had a research trip to Rome planned for a few months later.
On the trip, she visited the museum in Civitavecchia. She learned the stone was part of an exhibit of grave markers discovered in the 1860s during construction in the port city.
The construction had unearthed a necropolis of at least 21 military men, she said, including Sextus.
The museum officials, Lusnia said, are excited to have the marker back where it belongs.
So how did the stone end up outside the museum? From here, the story gets fuzzy.
The Civitavecchia museum once held at least 21 gravestones, but fewer than half survived a bombing during World War II, Lusnia said.
And in the chaos after the war, recordkeeping was less than ideal. When the museum reopened in the 1970s, staff there couldn’t find the marker for Sextus.
“We don’t know if this stone was rescued at this time or in the rubble and found later, but we had suspected that, given the history of the museum, that is how it went missing; it got picked up by somebody and taken here to the US,” Lusnia said. “And we were right about that.”
Lusnia said the previous owner of Santoro’s home, after seeing media coverage of the discovery, said the stone had been given to her by her grandparents, an Italian woman and a New Orleans man who was in Italy during World War II.
The woman put the stone - not knowing its ancient history - in the backyard of the home before selling the house to Santoro.
An agent with the FBI’s New Orleans field office came to Santoro’s home to pick up the stone in May and hold it while the FBI’s Art Crime division handles the complex process of getting the marker back home, Lusnia said.
When contacted for comment, the New Orleans field office said it was not answering press questions during the government shutdown.
Gravestones like the one Santoro found were important in Roman culture.
Lusnia said the stones were often placed along walking paths to encourage the living to stop and consider the deceased.
Ancient Romans believed that keeping alive memories of the dead allowed the deceased to have an afterlife, she said.
“I think Sextus Congenius Verus should be very thrilled to be remembered all these years later,” Lusnia said.
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