The Via Basiliano necropolis, an ancient burial ground, came to light only in 1997, revealed by the shovel of a construction crew in what is now the Parco della Serenissima. Its location, in ancient terms, sits in the landscape between the lines of the via Collatina and the via Praenestina, two of the great consular roads that once fanned out from Rome into the countryside. Such necropoleis typically lined the approaches to cities, their tombs a last, silent address for the dead. Here, the excavations did not stop at graves. They also uncovered traces of first-millennium BCE agricultural activity, suggesting this land was worked long before it became a final resting place. The site offers a rare, layered glimpse of a Roman landscape where the living farmed alongside the dead, the furrow and the funerary urn sharing the same soil.
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