monumenti sepolcrali di età romana sull'antica via Postumia

Along the old Postumia road, now the Via Emilia, just outside Tortona, three Roman tombs still stand. This area was a burial ground from the late Iron Age, with use continuing into late antiquity and the Middle Ages, so the dead kept company here for a very long time. These monuments, known since the early 1900s, are imposing survivors.

One is a curious affair: a ten-metre concrete base, a sixteen-sided sandstone crepidine, and an octagonal body with radial walls meeting a central pillar. Inside, a stripped rhomboid cell. Another is a more straightforward parallelepiped, two stacked blocks, the upper set back, with a round cell at the podium’s centre; its western side still stands three metres high. A third was excavated in the 1930s: a cuspidate tomb within an enclosure, later partly reburied. The site also yielded many inscriptions, mostly early Christian and early medieval. These are not hidden; they sit plainly by the roadside, solid, strange, and quietly eloquent of Roman funerary ambition.

Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.