The Aventinus Minor Project: Repartitioning Defensive, Domestic, and Religious Space on a Roman Hill

Data evento
8 Aprile 2026

City of Rome – The Aventinus Minor Project: Repartitioning Defensive, Domestic, and Religious Space on a Roman Hill

Elizabeth Wueste (American University in Rome)

This lecture presents the preliminary excavation results of the Aventinus Minor Project’s from 2021-2024 and contributes to recent reinterpretations of Rome’s defensive, domestic, and religious topography across space and time. AMP unites excavation with the involvement of multigenerational community members, including local elementary and high school students, and residents of the Instituto Santa Margherita convalescent home.
The site is located between the Circus Maximus and the Baths of Caracalla, adjacent to Santa Balbina Church. Limited 1980’s test trenches and archival research indicated that the site could contain a portion of the presumed Servian Wall, Roman houses, early Christian architecture, and Renaissance vineyards.
Excavations unearthed a complex multi-use neighborhood with intact strata from modern, Renaissance, late antique, and imperial phases of occupation. Features included an early cistern, Neronian mosaic and fresco fragments, later Roman sewage systems, and a late antique lime kiln, and Renaissance vineyards. The material finds reference the prolonged use of an urban space for evolving domestic, industrial, and religious purposes.
Conversely, AMP’s excavations discovered little conclusive evidence of the Servian Walls, suggesting that the long-accepted assumption that the Walls ran over the top of the hill might be reexamined, and the large opus quadrata blocks could belong to another unspecified building, perhaps an aqueduct.

https://bsr.ac.uk/city-of-rome-the-aventinus-minor-project-repartitioning-defensive-domestic-and-religious-space-on-a-roman-hill/