Ravenna

Research by the University of Bologna and the MAPS Project

In Ravenna, archaeology has to contend with a singular condition: a city of continuous life, it preserves within its modern urban fabric the famous late-antique and early-medieval monuments inscribed on the UNESCO list, whose remarkably rich phases have ended up overshadowing the ancient period, which is far harder to perceive. The Roman city of Ravenna, in fact, lies buried beneath a thick blanket of deposits and sinks ever lower owing to subsidence and the rising water table: it is, at one and the same time, a "visible and invisible" city. Born and developed as a city of water, on sandy rises and islands at the estuary of several watercourses, near a southern branch of the Po delta, so much so that Vitruvius and Strabo described it as a kind of forerunner of Venice, the city preserves traces of its Republican walls (late 3rd century BC), of the Fossa Augusta and of the Via Popilia, and underwent a phase of renewal in the Augustan age, before becoming the capital of the West in AD 402. It is precisely the difficulty of reading this deeper dimension that forms the starting point of the research carried out by the University of Bologna.

The work stems from an initiative of the Study Centre for the Archaeology of the Adriatic (ARCADRIA), based in Ravenna: the project "Ravenna Sotto i Piedi" ("Ravenna Beneath Our Feet"), launched in 2020 with the cataloguing of the remains of the Roman city known from the scholarly literature, which were brought together in a digital map available online that allows users to walk through the city, pausing at the places where fragments of the ancient urban fabric survive, today buried a few metres down. From this outreach experience the Ravenna strand of the MAPS project (Methods and processes for the Analysis of Pluristratified Sites) was then born — a PRIN project funded by the PNRR – Next Generation EU (2023-2025), for which Enrico Giorgi is the head of the University of Bologna's local unit. The project, conducted by the Department of History and Cultures and the Department of Cultural Heritage in Ravenna under an agreement with the Superintendency and the Municipality of Ravenna, aims to study the Roman-period urban landscape and to give it back to the public, integrating archaeological analysis with the study of environmental change.

The activities have unfolded on several fronts. In terms of documentation, the researchers carried out the review and digitisation of the archival material held by the Superintendency, which was gathered into a database useful for heritage protection and intended to be made accessible to the community through a web platform. Fieldwork focused on two sample contexts located on the edges of the ancient city and connected to the former wetlands: the area of Santa Croce, to the north, where palaeoenvironmental and geoarchaeological studies of the survey cores are under way (with geochemical, micropalaeontological and archaeobotanical analyses) and where a microstratigraphic excavation laboratory was held at the Superintendency's Operational Centre (2025); and the area of Viale Galilei, in the southern outskirts, where the study of the documentation and finds from an old 1995 excavation, a sequence of road surfaces datable between the 1st and 6th centuries AD, with more than sixty crates of material reordered and catalogued (2025), made it possible to reread the evolution of a strip of the extra-urban landscape. To these are added non-invasive geophysical surveys, in continuity with the University's long tradition in the study of the ancient landscape of Ravenna and Classe. Finally, on the public-archaeology side, the project promoted urban treks with citizens along the routes devised by MAPS (2024-2025) and the public presentation of the results at the National Museum of Ravenna (February 2026), with the aim of restoring to the people of Ravenna the "vertical," hidden dimension of their city.