Epigraphy is everywhere in the Eternal City. It dominates the public spaces before its fountains and façades, and proliferates on monuments, walls, and pavements inside its churches. Embodiments of power and memory, inscriptions shaped Rome and the experiences of its inhabitants – built environment, lived space, and, for those who quarried and carved, working lives.  In this project, the post-antique inscriptions of the papal Urbs are revisited as places where the past is not simply commemorated but constituted; where ecclesiastical and political history meet the histories of labour, art, and knowledge, and over a long period of time.  

This project was initiated by Renaissance expert and BSR Research Fellow Dr Oren Margolis of the University of East Anglia in collaboration with the BSR and with the support of the Leverhulme Trust. It seeks, through systematic re-evaluation and re-publication, to put the vast amount of writing on stone in Rome from the end of Antiquity (ca. 590) until the breach of Porta Pia by the Italian army and the end of the temporal power of the Papacy (1870) on a basis of sound philological, material, and art-historical knowledge. One major goal is to transform with up-to-date data and commentary and by means of digital annotation the early modern and nineteenth-century sylloges in which most Roman inscriptions have been recorded. Other research focuses on the ideology of developments in Renaissance epigraphy and papal titulature. Together we aim to put Christian Rome’s inscriptions at the disposal of scholars and a wider public alike, as real, layered historical artefacts