A New Orleans couple clearing away undergrowth in their home’s yard unearthed a grave marker, setting off a quest for answers about how the roughly 1,900-year-old relic ended up there – and an effort to repatriate it to Italy.
The remarkable discovery was the work of Tulane University anthropologist Daniella Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, according to a report published online Monday by the magazine of New Orleans’s Preservation Resource Center (PRC).
As the PRC put it, after finding the headstone in March, Santoro and Lorenz noted that an inscription carved on it appeared to be in Latin, the language of ancient Rome. Santoro contacted University of New Orleans archaeologist D Ryan Gray and to her Tulane colleague Susann Lusnia, an associate professor of classical studies.
Gray, meanwhile, sent photos of the unusual flat marble slab to University of Innsbruck professor Harald Stadler, who forwarded them to his brother, a Latin instructor.
Lusnia and Stadler independently arrived at the same stunning conclusion: the headstone was dedicated to a circa second-century Roman sailor and military member named Sextus Congenius Verus. And the stone fit the description of one reported missing from the city museum of Civitavecchia, Italy, near where it had originally been found, Gray wrote in a column for the PRC’s magazine.
Lusnia from there contacted the Civitavecchia museum, and those working with Santoro turned the stone over to the FBI’s art crime team as a key step toward repatriating it.
The group that Santoro dubbed her “team tombstone” also took a crack at trying to figure out how the relic ended up in New Orleans, according to Gray’s piece for the PRC, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving New Orleans’s architectural heritage.
From what the group could tell, Congenius Verus’s tombstone was likely brought to New Orleans sometime in the 20th century, perhaps after the second world war, which saw the US military and other Allied forces fight in Italy. Yet it is not immediately clear who may have done that.
Santoro and Lorenz’s home belonged to the family of late locals Frank and Selma Simon for most of the 1900s, archival records cited by Gray showed. They did not strike Santoro’s team as likely culprits for having whisked the tombstone away from Italy.
Frank – who managed a wholesale shoe company – reportedly died in 1945. His daughters, four of whom worked as salespeople and one as a seamstress, then retained the home until 1991. Lorenz and Santoro bought the home in 2018, New Orleans property tax assessor records showed.
Santoro’s group briefly focused on a nextdoor neighbor of the Simons as a more likely candidate to have brought the stone over because he was a member of the US navy during the second world war. But the team later decided he was unlikely to have done that, too. Gray recounted how records from New Orleans’s National World War II Museum showed he only ever served in the conflict’s Pacific theater of operations.
Lusnia eventually traveled to the city museum of Civitavecchia – just north-west of Rome – and learned the facility had been almost entirely destroyed amid an Allied bombing campaign between 1943 and 1944. The museum, which did not reopen until 1970, lost most of its collection.
Gray wrote how Lusnia also learned that a 1954 inventory that mentioned Congenius Verus’s tombstone was compiled from earlier documents rather than first-hand knowledge. “This made it all the more likely that the item was lost in the chaos after the war,” Gray wrote.
Lusnia’s research confirmed that US army troops traveled through Civitavecchia and remained there for some time after Rome fell to the Allied forces in early June 1944. However, because the effort was not guaranteed to establish how the gravestone made its way to Louisiana’s well-known city, the group held off examining thousands of service records of soldiers who passed through Civitavecchia in those days to check for possible New Orleans connections.
Gray made it a point to say that it was impossible to rule out the stone’s having passed into the hands of an antique dealer who sold it to a tourist after the war – which was a time when there was no way to meaningfully police such sales. “Perhaps a family member or someone cleaning out the house after a sale saw it just as a convenient paving stone for a muddy yard,” Gray wrote speculatively. “Right now, it is impossible to say, though we’ll continue to look for new possibilities.”
He wrote that the Civitavecchia museum’s staff was looking forward to throwing a celebration whenever they got the stone back and could properly display it once again.
And he added that, to him, the saga of Congenius Verus’s tombstone “reflects a wonderful intersection of a homeowner’s curiosity ultimately bringing to light something unexpected and historically significant”.
Ramon Antonio Vargas
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