Simon Keay once wrote that Ostia and Portus “underpinned the broader network of ports that has been labelled as the port system of Imperial Rome.”Footnote ¹ Keay’s own work highlighted an underlying tension in the study of the two archaeological sites: they were defined on the one hand very much by their relationship with other cities, most notably Rome, and on the other hand by their relationship with one another, in ways that the traditional narrative did not always capture. With the untimely death of Keay, Ostia e Portus (the book) comes at an inflection point in the study of the two cities, not only because Keay was one of its guiding hands, but also because recent research, including Keay’s own, has generated new questions about Ostia and Portus that are as yet unresolved.

Ostia e Portus is the result of the sixth of the “Ostia Seminars,” held at the École française de Rome and the Archaeological Park of Ostia Antica, on 10 and 11 April 2019.Footnote ² The intention of the seminars was to provide a forum for the presentation of new data and preliminary results to further academic debate. This meeting was organized around four central themes: (1) the urban development of Ostia, (2) socio-economic issues and numismatics, (3) Late Antique and Christian Ostia, and (4) recent research on the site of Ostia.

The editors of this book, Maria Letizia Caldelli, Nicolas Laubry, and Fausto Zevi state that their main intention for the series and the volume is to bring Ostian scholars of different disciplines into contact, but also to provide a platform for “ricercatori di tutti i paesi possono confrontarsi intorno a temi definiti in anticipo, o proporre uno stato delle loro ricerche in ambito archeologico, epigrafico o storico” (1). In this, I believe the editors have succeeded in creating opportunities for new voices from a variety of disciplines, and particularly from younger scholars. By my count, of the 34 authors represented in the volume, a commendable half are early-career scholars or graduate students. This comes with very real advantages and disadvantages; for instance, the maps and argumentation want for polish, but the new ideas and enthusiasm behind them are palpable. The disparate topics addressed in the book can make for a difficult read, but there are also a lot of open questions about Ostia and Portus at the moment, and one can feel the energy of these scholars as they begin to answer them.

Early studies of the two cities focused on Ostia, with that city’s well-preserved houses, public baths, vast corpus of epigraphy, and monumental architecture.Footnote ³ That evidence was treated synchronically with only a few exceptions, such as Russell Meiggs’s seminal work on the development of the city.Footnote ⁴ Between the late 1990s and 2010, Ostia and Portus exploded with new projects that sought to provide solid stratigraphic contexts for buildings and the development of the city, with a particular focus on Republican Ostia and the raising of the ground level in the 2nd c. CE.Footnote ⁵ Pedestrian surveys and the deployment of geophysical survey, such as Keay’s, began detailing the relationship between Ostia and Portus and revealing a far more developed hinterland around both sites and a much closer relationship between them than previously thought.Footnote ⁶ Scholars also began looking beyond a Classical past to explore the city’s transformation through the ages.Footnote ⁷ Ultimately, scholars yearned for a thicker description of the two communities beyond architectural studies and stratigraphy. They sought to humanize the city. Buildings once seen as singular architectural feats were transformed into investments of time, energy, and resources.Footnote ⁸ Temples that were once symbols of Roman identity or collections of morphological choices became sites of religious rites and forges of collective local identities.Footnote ⁹ Ports were redefined not as simple infrastructure, but as sites of human activities such as anchorage, berth, and cabotage.Footnote ¹⁰ Moving past famous thermopolia or warehouses, scholars began developing synthetic understandings of Ostia’s economy that bridged both long-distance trade and local production.Footnote ¹¹

It is within this disparate and interdisciplinary context that Ostia e Portus must be viewed. It is not a book with a single clear message, but the four themes of the volume represent active areas of inquiry at Ostia and Portus. Consisting of 16 chapters, the book is organized into five parts: a substantive introduction and four sections arranged thematically. A recurring idea throughout the book is the dynamic interplay between urban development and economic activities. The first theme is urban planning, the second is loosely socio-economic issues, the third is Late Antique and early medieval developments, while the fourth and final section concerns recent investigations into the archaeological site of Portus. The studies collectively highlight how Ostia and Portus evolved not only as pivotal maritime hubs, but also as vibrant urban centers in their own right and with their own unique social, economic, religious, and cultural mores. Moreover, all the studies do a great job of highlighting continuity into the Middle Ages, something Mediterranean archaeology is not always successful at, emphasizing how these sites evolved and adapted to new political and economic realities.

The theme of the book’s first section, consisting of three chapters, broadly deals with the development of the urban plan of Ostia, with a focus on its architectural phasing and the enigmatic raising of the ground level in the 2nd c. CE. Grégory Mainet combines legacy data from early 20th-c. excavations with an analysis of the road networks of the western district of the city to revise the construction phasing of the area, dividing its development into seven distinct phases beginning in the 8th c. BCE and ending in the middle of the 2nd c. CE. The study is intended to set the groundwork, via non-invasive investigation, for excavations, but it also arrives at several important conclusions. First, the road network of the western districts grew gradually into the 2nd c. CE. Second, there was no single event in which the ground level in the western quarter was raised; instead, a more continuous process of additive action culminated in a vast effort to raise the overall elevation during the construction boom of Mainet’s phase seven, during the first half of the 2nd c. CE. In a similar vein, Massimiliano David, Stefano De Togni, and Maria Stella Graziano report on the results of the Ostia Marina Project, which sequenced construction units and conducted targeted excavations of the Caseggiato delle due scale, the Terme del Sileno, the Terme della Marciana, and the building at IV, ix, 5. They not only found that efforts to raise the elevation involved a continuous process, rather than a single event, but also hypothesize that the agents of these changes were more likely local owners of individual lots than state actors. The final chapter in this first section is Marcello Turci’s analysis of the area outside the Porta Marina in the southwestern district of the city. While the two previous chapters emphasized localized modifications to the built environment and interventions by small-scale actors, Turci deploys evidence from the excavations of the so-called Terme Marittime and the Terme di Porta Marina to show that a large-scale Domitianic effort was made to monumentalize the area. He reminds the reader that individual and state interventions are not mutually exclusive, arriving at a new model for local and imperial interventions.

The second theme of the book brings together an eclectic series of socio-economic studies. The first chapter, by Gloria Olcese, Andrea Razza, and Domenico Michele Surace, is an archaeometric and ceramic study of the pottery from Longarina 1 and the “Binario Morto,” two shipwrecks with their cargo partially intact. As part of the larger Immensa Aequora project, a comprehensive maritime archaeological study, the authors deploy this evidence to reconstruct aspects of the foodways of Ostia and systems of food supply that fed the city. Similarly, Matthias Bruno, Donato Attanasio, and Walter Prochaska use stable isotope analysis and EPR spectroscopy to identify trace elements in the marble of the various Ostian sculptures that meet certain criteria of typology and context. I believe that these results will be most productive if framed in terms of energetics, fitting into a tradition pioneered by DeLaine.Footnote ¹²

Shifting methods, Heikki Solin analyzes a portion of the graffiti and dipinti from the Caserma di Vigili (II, v, 1), ultimately using this evidence to explore the organizational structure of the caserma and the ideological preoccupations of the vigiles themselves, who were primarily from Rome and who touted their full citizenship. Continuing to focus on the social lives of Ostia’s inhabitants, Ria Berg and Arja Karivieri analyze the erotic imagery of Ostia in its archaeological context, considering how eroticism might graft onto foreignness or onto grief, as most lamps with erotic scenes were found in the tombs of women. Further on the theme, Emanuela Spagnoli offers a diachronic analysis of Ostia’s numismatic evidence, with an eye toward its place in the city’s stratigraphy. Finding remarkable consistency in the coin supply from the Republican period to at least the end of the 2nd c. CE, Spagnoli infers that there was a strong urban economy in this period due to trade introducing coinage from the East, healthy integration of small-scale economic actors, and competent administrative civic management. In the last chapter of this section on socio-economic topics, Michel Christol explores the iconographic and epigraphic treatment of the annona on 1st-c. CE coins, identifying a shift in the Flavian period away from an emphasis on plenty and toward a broader concern with aequitas (perhaps in the legal sense of “fairness”).

The third theme, Late Antique and Christian Ostia, challenges the traditional wisdom that the city was a largely a product of the 2nd and 3rd c. CE. Antonio Licordari and Angelo Pellegrino provide a close reading of inscriptions attesting imperial euergetism in the 4th c. CE, highlighting in particular the building programs of Valentinian and Honorius. They reassess the interventions of Late Antique emperors, who are often overlooked as contributors to the built environments of Ostia and Portus, which are more commonly associated with Early Imperial emperors. Donatella Nuzzo, meanwhile, compiles and analyzes Christian inscriptions from Ostia, contributing to the forthcoming volume of the Inscriptiones Christianae Italiae and enhancing understanding of the early Christian community in the city. Finally, Simona Pannuzi and Andrea Carbonara reflect on Christian cult buildings in the Ostian area, using recent excavations and legacy data. Some of the maps and screenshots in this chapter lack refinement, but the authors’ work is an important first step in reconstructing the Late Antique or early medieval Christian religious landscape, which was built into the carcass of Ostia’s Classical past.

The fourth and final theme is Portus and its changing nature, presenting the results of the excavations conducted by the École française de Rome and the Università di Huelva. Évelyne Bukowiecki and Milena Mimmo, in a beautifully illustrated chapter, present the results of the recent investigations by the École française de Rome into Portus’s marine infrastructure, highlighting the diachronic nature of the interventions in creating the port infrastructure. In a similarly well-illustrated chapter, Javier Bermejo Meléndez, Juan M. Campos Carrasco, Renato Sebastiani, et al. present the preliminary data from a project on the east–west dock of Portus, exploring the construction techniques and material evidence that illustrate the evolution of the quay over different periods. Cristian D’Ammassa, Priamo Antonio Manna, and Paolo Rosati reveal valuable insights into the abandonment and subsequent reuse of warehouses near the modern Via Portuense, between the Episcopio and the fossa Traiana, in this sector of Portus Romae from Late Antiquity through the early Middle Ages. Finally, Paola Germoni and Cristina Genovese examine the historical development of the Sant’Ippolito complex on Isola Sacra, using excavations and legacy data to paint a history of the area over the longue durée.

To sum up, this book offers significant insights into the evolution of Ostia and Portus as key maritime and commercial hubs, emphasizing the interplay between infrastructure, economy, and social structures. I think the most important takeaway from the volume, for me, was that various phenomena that are often painted in broad brushstrokes as imperial or municipal actions, such as the construction of the port or the raising of the ground level, are actually defined by many processes that are more localized. Interventions on a small scale are evident throughout Ostia’s built environment and in the construction of the Portus quays. The diachronic studies presented in the first section of this volume, and those of the excavation reports from Portus, really drive home that the site formation processes of Ostia and Portus are not so straightforward as we often like to think. These chapters and their associated projects should be cited often. In general, the volume does a good job of highlighting some of the important fieldwork currently being conducted at Ostia and Portus.

Overall, however, there is a sense that the volume misses an opportunity to take a stand, a shortcoming of its eclectic nature. Despite the thematic organization, the sections and the papers themselves rarely make explicit the debates to which they are intended to contribute. Some chapters present only evidence, without substantive introduction or conclusion, which means the authors fail to explain to the reader the significance of their data to academic discourse. I think the data presented and the nascent studies will, nevertheless, be important to the academic questions with which they do not explicitly engage. For instance, how identity is forged and the ways that socialization is enforced has been an important topic, from studies of foreigners in Italy to those of sub-elite voluntary association. Solin’s work on the vigiles may be significant in showing how acculturation works and the role of Roman citizenship. Berg and Karivieri’s work on the sexualization of different types of people would be similarly relevant. Spagnoli’s work and that of Bruno et al. could be important for understanding how social links are grafted onto economic trade.

From a more rigid economic perspective, the scale and significance of overseas trade in terms of creating interregional market economies has been fairly intensely debated since 2012; the numismatic work and the work on infrastructure could be roped into that conversation.Footnote ¹³ Investment, as both a public and a private act, has been a focus of a number of recent studies, and the works on infrastructure at Portus and the civic engineering of Ostia’s built environment seem like candidates to be contextualized in that body of literature.Footnote ¹⁴ Turci’s work contrasts with that of Mainet and David et al. in a way that very much highlights the different levels at which investment can occur. Infrastructure, too, has been a topic of recent discussion, and the joint project between the École française de Rome and the Università di Huelva, and the many authors writing on the fourth theme of the volume, are revealing the way in which infrastructure was built, particularly in showing the extent to which it is dynamic, requiring construction and constant maintenance. Similarly, Christol’s work on imperial interests and intentions provides ideological context for policy choices and infrastructural investments.

Another area that is ripe for engagement is continuity. All the book’s sections do a good job of incorporating diachronic data and analyses, but the chapters by Licordari, Pellegrino, Nuzzo, Pannuzi, and Carbonara are poised to make a real difference in how we perceive Ostia, bridging its roles as imperial port city and beach retreat for Rome’s modern inhabitants. How and why some cities persisted and others perished at the end of antiquity has attracted much attention in the last few decades, and most archaeological sites across the Mediterranean have seen a shift away from their well-trodden Classical pasts toward their medieval histories.Footnote ¹⁵

In any event, Ostia e Portus is somewhat eclectic and presents new data in an undigested way because this is an exciting time. There are new teams, new questions, and an abundance of scholars writing about dozens of issues and adopting a variety of techniques and methods. In the vacuum left by Keay’s death, new voices are emerging to captain the ship and lead it to harbor.