While clearing their backyard of brush, a New Orleans couple stumbled upon a most unexpected find: a 1,900-year-old Roman gravestone and a centuries-old mystery. With help from classicists in New Orleans and Austria, the marble slab with a Latin inscription, discovered in March by Tulane anthropologist Daniella Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, was identified as belonging to Sextus Congenius Verus, a Roman sailor from the second century AD, per the Guardian. It matches the description of an artifact that vanished decades ago from a museum in Civitavecchia, Italy, near Rome. How a relic from ancient Italy landed in a Louisiana yard remains an open question.
The couple's home was owned by the same family for most of the 20th century, but records don't suggest they spirited away any Roman artifacts. A neighbor who served in World War II was briefly considered a suspect, but records show he was stationed in the Pacific, not Italy. The Civitavecchia museum, destroyed in WWII and not reopened until 1970, lost much of its collection during the chaos, making it plausible the headstone disappeared in the aftermath and later traveled to the US, perhaps through an antique dealer or a returning soldier, according to a report from New Orleans' Preservation Resource Center. The tombstone has since been turned over to the FBI's art crime unit to start the process of returning it to Italy.
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