A 1,900-Year-Old Roman Tombstone Turns Up in a New Orleans Garden!
When New Orleans couple Daniella Santoro and Aaron Lorenz set out to clear weeds behind their home in the Carrollton neighbourhood, they certainly weren’t expecting to stumble across a piece of ancient Roman history. Beneath the overgrowth lay a heavy marble slab inscribed with Latin text.
Santoro, who happens to be an anthropologist at Tulane University, initially feared their house might be built over a forgotten cemetery. But what she and experts later uncovered was even more extraordinary. The slab was actually a 1,900-year-old Roman tombstone, once marking the grave of a sailor who served in the empire’s Mediterranean fleet.
The marble tablet, roughly a foot wide and slightly longer, bore a lengthy Latin inscription. Once photos of the find were shared with classical scholars in the United States and Europe, including Tulane’s Susann Lusnia and Harald Stadlerfrom the University of Innsbruck, the mystery message was quickly translated. It read:
“To the Spirits of the Dead for Sextus Congenius Verus, soldier of the praetorian fleet Misenensis, from the tribe of the Bessi [of Thrace], who lived 42 years and served 22 in the military, on the trireme Asclepius. Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, his heirs, made this for him, well deserving.”
Photo Credit: D. Ryan Gray / Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans
The words identified the stone as belonging to Sextus Congenius Verus, a sailor from Thrace who served aboard the warship Asclepius in the imperial fleet based at Misenum, near modern-day Naples. Scholars confirmed that the artefact was an authentic second-century CE funerary monument. But how on earth did a Roman tombstone end up in a New Orleans back garden?
Archaeologist D. Ryan Gray from the University of New Orleans traced the inscription back to a nearly identical headstone once held in Italy’s National Archaeological Museum of Civitavecchia, an ancient port city northwest of Rome. That museum was destroyed during an Allied bombing raid in the Second World War, and the tombstone had been recorded as missing ever since.
This offered a tantalising clue. The slab may have been taken amid the wartime chaos, possibly by an American soldier stationed near Civitavecchia after the liberation of Rome in 1944, a period when looting and the illicit trade in antiquities were sadly common.
Further research revealed that the New Orleans property had once belonged to Frank Simon, a shoe company manager who lived there for decades until his death in 1945. Simon seemed an unlikely culprit for smuggling home a Roman artefact. Investigators also looked into a neighbour who had served in the U.S. Navy, but records showed he had been deployed in the Pacific, not Europe. For now, the tombstone’s mysterious journey across the Atlantic remains unsolved.
With support from the Antiquities Coalition, Santoro and Lorenz contacted the FBI’s Art Crime Team, who are now safeguarding the artefact while plans are made to repatriate it to Italy.
Experts later confirmed that the headstone perfectly matched the records of the Civitavecchia museum’s destroyed collection. Italian curators were overjoyed to learn that this missing piece of their heritage had survived against the odds and would soon be returning home.
Although the full story of how Sextus Congenius Verus’ memorial crossed oceans and centuries may never be uncovered, its rediscovery is a striking reminder of how fragments of the ancient world can unexpectedly resurface in our everyday lives, even in a quiet garden in New Orleans.