During the laying of a long distance power line (the 150kV ACEA “Forte Antenne-Quirinale”) a necropolis came to light in the vicinity of the Bank for Deposits and Loans. This comprised three robbed burials, all found at a depth of slightly less than 1m below street level. Stratigraphical investigation revealed a group of burials, of great interest due to the lack of recent finds of archaic and mid Republican funerary contexts within the Aurelian Walls, of the “a fossa” type. Two monolithic sarcophaghi of Palatine tufa were embedded directly in the ground, with an earth fill and wedged supports around the sides; the covers were formed by a single horizontal slab.
The absence of grave goods, probably robbed in antiquity or never placed in the tombs ab origine, means there is no dating evidence. The disturbance of tombs 1 and 2 was carried out in a respectful manner, the skeletal remains being moved to the sides of the sarcophaghi.
The funerary area was obliterated by a road-bed made up of limestone nodules. A second glareatio was laid over the first some time between the end of the 2nd and the middle of the 1st century B.C.
This discovery re-proposes the question of the presence of groups of burials located, even at some distance from each other, along the roads leaving the city from as early as the prehistoric period.
Although an attribution to the archaic period is not to be excluded, the absence of an abandonment layer between the burials and the phase 1 road-bed, which the ceramic finds date to no earlier than the 2nd century B.C., and the direct overlaying of the latter on the tombs, suggests a “low” date for the necropolis of the mid Republican period (4th-2nd century B.C.)
The sudden laying of the road-bed immediately above the burials and the consequent obliteration of tombs 1 and 2 also indicates a significant change in the administrative organization of the area. In the 2nd century B.C. it probably lost its original function to make way for the road, the direction of which cannot be specified at the moment (Oberdan Menghi, Manola Pales).