Buried Roman Town Discovered in Italy

An entire Roman town has been unearthed by archaeologists in central Italy, challenging assumptions about the Empire’s decline.

A research team led by the University of Cambridge uncovered the remains of a roofed theater, a market, and a river port under what is now largely crop fields in Southern Lazio.

The study suggests Interamna Lirenas was a thriving town whose decline began three hundred years later than previously thought. Analysis of pottery at the site indicates it resisted decline until the later part of the 3rd century AD.

Originally founded as a Roman colony in the 4th century BC, the town was abandoned around the year 500 CE. It was scavenged for building materials and, over time, its remains were completely lost from view. Until recently, the site was an uninterrupted stretch of farmland, with no recognizable archaeological features.

In 2022, researchers successfully produced the first images of the ancient site, using geophysical methods that allowed them to look beneath the surface of the earth and map the layout of the entire settlement, which spans twenty-five hectares.

Roman town was a bustling economic and social center

The resulting pictures have already thrown up a few surprises. Earlier scholars had previously imagined that the Roman town of Interamna Lirenas was something of a sleepy backwater, but instead, the large marketplace and theater suggest that it was a bustling economic and social center in its own right.

At its peak, the town is believed to have had a population of around two thousand.

“We started with a site so unpromising that no one had ever tried to excavate it,” said Dr. Alessandro Launaro, the study’s author and Interamna Lirenas Project lead at Cambridge’s Classics Faculty.

“We found a thriving town adapting to every challenge thrown at it for 900 years,” Launaro added. “We’re not just saying that this town was special—it’s far more exciting than that. We think many other average Roman towns in Italy were just as resilient. It’s just that archaeologists have only recently begun to apply the right techniques and approaches to see this.”

He added that “based on the relative lack of imported pottery, archaeologists have assumed that Interamna Lirenas was a declining backwater. We now know that wasn’t the case.”

The research team conducted a series of digs and carried out a magnetic and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of about sixty acres.

The survey near the River Liri revealed the presence of a large warehouse of forty by twelve meters, a temple, and a bath complex. The researchers are confident that these structures served a river port between the late first century BC and the fourth century AD.