A rare roofed theatre, markets, warehouses, a river port and other startling discoveries made by a Cambridge-led team of archaeologists - including Gonville & Caius College Fellow Dr Alessandro Launaro - challenge major assumptions about the decline of Roman Italy.

New findings from Interamna Lirenas, traditionally written off as a failed backwater in Central Italy, change our understanding of Roman history, its excavators believe.

Their 13-year study – published in the edited volume Roman Urbanism in Italy – shows that the town in Southern Lazio continued to thrive well into the 3rd century AD, bucking what is normally considered Italy’s general state of decline in this period.

The team’s pottery analysis indicates that the town’s decline began around 300 years later than previously assumed, while a systematic geophysical survey has produced an astonishingly detailed image of the entire town’s layout, highlighting a wide range of impressive urban features.

“Back in 2010, Professor Martin Millett and I started with a site so unpromising that no one had ever tried to excavate it. That’s very rare in Italy,” says Dr Launaro, the study’s author and Interamna Lirenas Project lead at Cambridge’s Faculty of Classics.

“There was nothing on the surface, no visible evidence of buildings, just bits of broken pottery. But what we discovered wasn’t a backwater, far from it. We found a thriving town adapting to every challenge thrown at it for 900 years.

“We’re not saying that this town was special, it’s far more exciting than that. We think many other average Roman towns in Italy were just as resilient. It’s just that archaeologists have only recently begun to apply the right techniques and approaches to see this.”

Read the full story on the University of Cambridge website: Italy’s tough town (cam.ac.uk)