How did a backwater town buck Roman Italy’s decline?

A Roman town prized by Julius Caesar but later written off as a backwater, bucked Italy's decline, a Cambridge-led team of archaeologists has found.

Dr Alessandro Launaro (Faculty of Classics) reveals the 13-year project’s most exciting discoveries, including an astonishingly detailed image of the entire town’s layout, a rare roofed theatre, markets, warehouses, a river port and thousands of pieces of pottery which challenge major assumptions about the decline of Roman Italy.

Interamna Lirenas, a newly excavated Roman town in Central Italy, changes our understanding of Roman history, Dr Launaro argues.

His team’s findings show that the town thrived well into the 3rd century AD, bucking what is normally considered Italy’s general state of decline in this period.

The film features an interview with Dr Launaro in Cambridge’s Museum of Classical Archaeology, as well as drone footage from the dig site, images of finds and artist recreations.

The Interamna Lirenas Project is run by Cambridge’s Faculty of Classics in collaboration with the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le Province di Frosinone e Latina and the Comune di Pignataro Interamna, in partnership with the British School at Rome (since 2010) and Ghent University (2015–17). Fieldwork has been made possible by generous support from Cambridge’s Faculty of Classics, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/M006522/1), the Comune di Pignataro Interamna, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust.