Vatican Museums

The wall entitled “Inscriptions excavated from the soil of Ostia by order of Pius VII Pontifex Maximus” gathers together inscriptions from the excavations of Ostia carried out at the behest of the Pope, and led by Giuseppe Petrini from 1802 to 1805, same years before the allocation of the  collection in its current position in the Gallery. Ostia, a city with strong political, military and trade links to Rome, had experienced centuries of neglect, during which it became a centre for theft and the removal of building materials; then the excavations restored to light many remains of an ancient city that constituted a “little Rome”, a “window” on the daily life of the capital of the Empire.