Alessandro Sebastiani - Roman Archaeology UB

A Conversation on Etruria, Rome, and the Value of Long Chronologies

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of recording a podcast conversation on Etruria in the Roman world: the Roman conquest, the cultural transformations that followed, and the ways in which archaeology allows us to observe these processes not as abstract historical events, but as lived experiences within local communities. The episode has now been published, and I am very happy to share it....

http://asebastiani.com/2026/04/30/a-conversation-on-etruria-rome-and-the-value-of-long-chronologies/

I am delighted to share that I have been awarded a Global Research Scholar Grant in support of the project “Tracing Ancient Mobility: Isotopes, aDNA, and Migration in Roman and Post-Roman Italy (1st–8th c. CE).” We will soon begin preparations for the event, which will most likely take place in October.

My congratulations go as well to Dr. Alessandro Carabia (University of Kent, UK) for receiving this opportunity, and to Prof. Todd Fenton (Michigan State University), with whom we will shape and develop the event.

This grant builds on the scientific research carried out by the IMPERO Project, supported and directed by the Department of Classics at the University at Buffalo. As Principal Investigator of the project, I am especially pleased to see this work continue to grow through new international collaborations and new opportunities for discussion and research.

Buffalo City Hall

Buffalo City Hall remains one of the most compelling architectural statements in the city, not simply because of its scale, but because of the extraordinary care with which every surface, proportion, and decorative program was conceived. Built between 1929 and 1931 and dedicated in 1932, the building is a 32-story Art Deco landmark designed by Dietel, Wade & Jones, and conceived not as a neutral administrative container but as a monumental expression of Buffalo’s civic identity, industrial energy, and historical ambition....

Buffalo City Hall Buffalo City Hall remains one of the most compelling architectural statements in the city, not simply because of its scale, but because of the extraordinary care with which every surface, proportio…

La Gatta

I still remember that class in middle school when, for the first time, they played “La Gatta” by Gino Paoli for us. Our teacher made us listen to it several times and then asked what we thought the lyrics meant. In it, I saw the sadness of growing older, of becoming an adult, and of losing the innocence of childhood. The child in the song had nothing, and yet he had his cat....

La Gatta I still remember that class in middle school when, for the first time, they played “La Gatta” by Gino Paoli for us. Our teacher made us listen to it several times and then asked what we thought the…

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A very special book is finally out: Etruscan and Roman Hellenistic Anatomical Ex Voto by Fabiana Fabbri.

This volume is important not only because it addresses a fundamental topic for anyone working on sanctuaries, ritual practices, and ancient medicine, but also because of the long and complex journey behind it.

I am genuinely happy to see this project come to fruition, fully aware of the challenges it faced along the way. It is a milestone, and I am proud to have contributed to bringing it to completion.

A significant step forward in our understanding of Hellenistic Italy.

Sacred Landscapes – Memories and a Review

Writing a book is always emotional and deeply moving. The choice of topic remains tied both to professional passions and to private experiences, to stories of adventures, discoveries, and emotions connected to the self that could not otherwise find a voice in academic production. I remember very clearly when my colleague Fabiana Fabbri and I decided to shape the volume on sanctuaries and votive deposits....

Sacred Landscapes – Memories and a Review Writing a book is always emotional and deeply moving. The choice of topic remains tied both to professional passions and to private experiences, to stories of adventures, discoveries, and emotions …

In Rome there is a small, unsettlingly beautiful place that feels like a pause in the city’s noise: Church of the Sacred Heart of Suffrage, tucked along Lungotevere Prati.

It’s not just a church you visit. It’s a reminder you walk out with. Here the boundary between life and death feels thin, almost permeable. Not in a sensational way, but in the way that makes you quieter, more attentive, more human.

Inside, devotion takes on a vivid, almost tangible form. The tradition speaks of hypothetical traces left by souls on their way through Purgatory: shadowy handprints, scorched impressions, marks that appear on papers, cloth, and small objects, as if someone had tried, just once, to prove that the distance between worlds can be crossed.

Whether you read them as faith, folklore, or grief made visible, the effect is the same. This place holds a delicate tension: hope and devotion, loss and tenderness, fear and love. It suggests that memory has weight, and that prayer can become a bridge when words fail.

Maybe that’s why it matters. Because it asks us to look straight at impermanence, and still choose care.

A fragmented marble mortarium, pulled from the soil at Spolverino, Alberese, is a small object with an unexpectedly big biography 🏺🧱

In its first life it was a tool of care, a mortar for crushing seeds and herbs, for turning raw matter into nourishment, food that sustains bodies, work that sustains households, routines that sustain a community 🌿🌾🍞 Creation, quite literally, by grinding.

And then it changed meaning. Found broken into multiple pieces, yet still recomposable, it carries the trace of a later moment in the late fifth century, when marble was no longer valued for what it was, but for what it could become. Many fragments like this were destined for the lime kiln, burned down to feed new construction, dissolved into another material future 🔥⚱️🏗️ This one, somehow, slipped through. Not intact, but not erased.

That is what I love about archaeology, it is not only about “finding things,” but about catching objects mid-transformation, between use and reuse, care and extraction, survival and disappearance 🧭⛏️ Sometimes what reaches us is not the perfect artifact, but the almost-lost one. And that “almost” is where the story lives ✨

Spolverino, Alberese, GR. Mortarium in marble. Broken, saved, reconstructed, still speaking 🧩🗣️

If you want more field moments like this, objects, contexts, and the human choices behind them, follow along 🤝📍