When in Rome, do as the Romans do. And when in New Orleans, be on the lookout for lost Roman artifacts.
OK, that second one might not actually be a saying, but it turned out to be true for Daniella Santoro, who found a 1,900-year-old Roman grave marker while clearing out the backyard of her New Orleans home.
“The fact that it was in Latin that really just gave us pause, right?” Santoro tells The Associated Press. “I mean, you see something like that and you say, ‘OK, this is not an ordinary thing.'”
Santoro, who’s an anthropologist at Tulane University, showed the slab to a colleague in the classical archaeology department, who verified its authenticity.
“When I first saw the image that Daniella sent me, it really did send a shiver up my spine because I was just floored,” Susann Lusnia says.
As it turns out, the marker, which honors a sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus, had originally been kept by the National Archeological Museum in Civitavecchia, Italy, but was lost among many other artifacts in World War II.
As for how it made its way to New Orleans, it was given to the home’s prior owner, Erin Scott O’Brien, by her grandparents, who were stationed in Italy during the war. O’Brien recognized the slab when she saw a local news report on the discovery.
“None of us knew what it was,” O’Brien says. “We were watching the video, just like in shock.”