Flooding has formed one of Rome’s most persistent environmental challenges and during the Roman era the city was subject to frequent and devastating inundations. Throughout the Roman period, public institutions and private individuals undertook a variety of interventions along the Tiber and its tributaries in an attempt to control and manage the river. These ranged from small alterations to the river channel, to large-scale engineering projects that dramatically altered the landscape. While these interventions may have protected areas in their immediate vicinity, their piecemeal nature resulted in unintended consequences for riparian communities along the Tiber. Defending the riverbank in one area could transfer risk to another stretch of the watercourse, exacerbating hydrological risk. Although the effectiveness of Roman interventions along the Tiber are hard to quantify, the high frequency of floods recorded by literary sources suggests an adequate solution was never found.

James Page is an archaeologist whose research explores Roman social and economic interactions with waterways on the Italian Peninsula. He gained his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh in 2022 and was awarded a Rome Fellowship at the BSR in 2023. He currently holds a Marie Curie Fellowship at Barcelona, and will be returning to the BSR in June as its new Resident Fellow in Archaeology. His first monograph, From the Adriatic to the Alps. Roman transport and trade networks in Roman and Late Antique Northern Italy, was published in 2025 by Archaeopress. He has previously worked as an assistant director on the Upper Sabina Tiberina Project, and is a co-director of the upcoming Ager Curensis Project, a new archaeological initiative that seeks to understand the development of the ancient city of Cures Sabini and its hinterland in the Tiber Valley.

This lecture is part of the City of Rome programme, an intensive eight-week residential course directed by Dr. Christopher Siwicki, designed for postgraduates from selected British partner universities. The programme is aimed at students at the Master’s or early Doctoral level studying classical archaeology, art history, ancient history, and the transformation of antiquity in the Middle Ages and modern period.

See the full programme of City of Rome here.

The event is hybrid. You’re welcome to attend in person—no registration is needed, and access is free. If you would like to join us online, please make sure to register using the link above.