Ricerc@Sapienza

The history of Rome in the IVth and Vth century is full of disorders and difficulties; the city had lost its role of one and only capital of the Empire, but continued to be considered a symbol still worth of great consideration.
This fact is witnessed by the inscriptions related to public works and by the imperial laws issued after the half of the IVth century, where emperors and urban prefects show great interest in completing works that had been interrupted or in restoring already existing buildings. Among them, public baths and structures closely linked to them play a very important role.
The reason of this choice is probably the willingness of keeping in function services that were considered fundamental for the civic life, and of meeting the more and more pressing needs and requests of the popular mass.
This research aims to collect the documentary sources – with a focus on the epigraphic documents - related to restoratons of urban public baths in the IVth and Vth century, and to analyze their technical language, in order to propose a classification of the different types of intervention, and to give concrete answers to problems that haven’t been studied in depth.
A significant example is given by the Thermae Decianae and the inscriptions that are related – or may be related – to them.
We owe our knowledge of these public baths, built on the top of the Aventine hill around the middle of the IIIth century AD, and named after the emperor Decius, to some reconstructive drawings by Andrea Palladio, and little archaeological remains in the nowadays piazza del Tempio di Diana and under the Casale Torlonia. During the IVth century AD the Thermae Decianae were affected by important restauration activities that involved a porticus and some other unidentified structures (EDR150579)*. According to our proposal, a restauration of the same building can be recognized also in a recently published epigraphic fragment: in this latter case, the works, involving the Aqua Claudia, were led, in 367 AD, by the urban prefect Iunius Pomponius Ammonius with the help of his collaborators (EDR166240). But already two years before, in 365 AD, during the reign of Valentinian and Valens, a castellum Aquae Claudiae in the regio I was restored, as we know from another inscription (EDR112711): given the chronological vicinity of the two texts, it seems not to be impossible to relate the two interventions, both aimed to satisfy the water supply of a complex city like Rome. Not by chance, a large number of restaurations in this kind of structures (baths, aqueducts, bridges) are attested in the age of the Valentinian dinasty.
After the sack of Alarich in 410 AD, other works were necessary and are described very carefully: it was necessary to build a double voulted arch, that could sustain the external part of the tepidarium, since damages scattered all along the wall could have caused the collapse of the annexed rooms, as we read in the related memorial inscription (EDR111467).
These and other examples will be analysed in a study that, although is focused on Rome, will be extended to other cases in the rest of Italy and in the provinces of the Roman Empire, where other documents of the same kind can be found.