Journey through the Roman treasures of the Museum
The section of the museum dedicated to the Roman world is in rooms 9, 10 and 12 and concludes the path of the archaeological collections.
Room 9 is dedicated to Roman Padua. On the back wall dominates the model of the San Lorenzo Bridge, one of the best-preserved Roman monuments in the town, which testifies to the engineering excellence achieved by Roman builders in ancient Patavium. The model is made on a 1:20 scale and was probably commissioned by Carlo Anti for educational purposes.
It was the excavations conducted in 1937-1938 that brought to light the bridge, which had remained partially buried for centuries, along with the ancient river port of Patavium. An inscription on the central arch indicates its dating, between 40 and 30 BC, and attributes its testing to five municipal supervisors (adlegatei). The bridge, about 50 meters long, has three lowered arches supported by slender and robust piers.
Next to the model are displayed a fragment of the marble parapet of the bridge, which bears the name of the financier Allenius Strabo, a prominent political figure of the Augustan age, and a funerary stele that bears the name of the deceased: Publius Meclonius Salvianus, who lived between the 1st and 2nd century AD.
In room 10, dedicated to aspects of daily life and private worship, are arranged the amphorae, datable to the middle of the 1st century BC, which had been reused, after their primary use as transport containers, for the drainage system of the urban river port. In the adjacent showcase is the bronze statuette of Mercury coming from the same area. The showcase displays numerous other bronze statuettes depicting deities, offers, and anatomical parts, datable between the late Republican age and the Imperial age and mostly coming from various localities of the ancient Roman region of Venetia et Histria (e.g. bronze statuettes from Nesactium, in the Istrian peninsula).
In the showcase also stands out a substantial group of lamps of several types. Among these, the so-called Firmalampen, so named by scholars because they are characterized by the presence of the factory mark on the bottom. A mark, useful to understand the production area, is also reported in some of the terra sigillata containers, a fine pottery, typical of the Roman world, characterized by red glaze and relief decoration.
Among the bronze objects is an element of a steelyard (a type of balance) certainly intended for precision measurements given its small size, while some weights, also for balance, with metric incisions are in black stone. A curiosity are the fragments of architectural decorations that appear contained in frames made in the early twentieth century according to an educational display mode that finds correspondence in other coeval educational “small pictures”, preserved in the museum’s storerooms.
Room 12 houses glass artifacts from collections, datable between the 1st and 5th centuries AD and lacking provenance data. Of particular interest are the balsamaria, small containers for ointments and oils, and some large glass ollae. One of these, the only one perhaps coming from the Paduan territory, was reused to contain the cremated remains of a deceased who, after careful anthropological study of the bones, was probably identified as a woman between 20 and 30 years of age.
In this room there are also examples of archaeological fakes: purchased in the past by some private collectors and often exhibited alongside authentic artifacts, they finally came to the museum with the latter. Testimony of an antiquarian collecting of past times, they constitute interesting study models for today’s research on the falsification and illicit trade of cultural goods (link).
Finally, room 11 houses the Museum’s archive. On the wall there is a painting by Fulvio Pendini, named “Agricultural Machines” (1955), donated to the University by his heir Dr. Andrea Venzi. The Paduan artist in the 1930s was among the most prominent pictorial decoration of Palazzo Bo, central headquarters of the University of Padua.