Most people digging through an overgrown garden expect old bricks, lost tools or maybe a gnome that’s seen better days. Daniella Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lopez, found a 2,000-year-old Roman tombstone.
It started as one of those head-tilting moments. Half-buried in the vines behind their historic Carrollton home in New Orleans sat a marble slab etched in Latin. At first glance, it looked like the kind of decorative replica you’d find in a quirky garden shop. But Santoro, an anthropologist, couldn’t shake the feeling that this one was different.
“The fact that it was in Latin really just gave us pause, right?” she told the Associated Press. “I mean, you see something like that and you say, ‘Okay, this is not an ordinary thing.’”
Instead of brushing it off, she called in experts. Archaeologist Susann Lusnia of Tulane University and anthropologist D. Ryan Gray of the University of New Orleans examined the inscription. It didn’t take long for them to recognize the opening phrase: Dis Manibus — “to the spirits of the dead,” a standard dedication on ancient Roman tombstones.
Further translation revealed the man it honored: Sextus Congenius Verus, a Thracian-born Roman soldier who died at 42 after 22 years of service. The stone was commissioned by his heirs, Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus. Nearly 1,900 years later, his memorial had resurfaced in a backyard in Louisiana.
And remarkably, it wasn’t an unknown artifact. Records showed that the tablet once belonged to the National Archaeological Museum of Civitavecchia, a coastal Italian museum. It had stood in a small cemetery there before the museum was heavily damaged in Allied bombing during World War II. Dozens of artifacts were lost or displaced in the chaos that followed. The soldier’s grave marker was among those listed as missing. Even the measurements recorded by the museum exactly matched the stone found in Santoro’s garden.
How it crossed the Atlantic turned out to be another story, one wrapped in wartime movement and fading family memory. Erin Scott O’Brien, a former owner of the Carrollton house, said the stone once sat in a display cabinet at her grandfather’s home in Gentilly. He was Charles Paddock Jr., an American soldier stationed in Italy during WWII. When O’Brien moved into the home decades later, her mother gave her the slab.
“We planted a tree and said this is the start of our new house. Let’s put it outside in our garden,” she told Preservation in Print. “I just thought it was a piece of art. I had no idea it was a 2,000-year-old relic.”
The full truth of how Paddock obtained the tablet may never be known. The war scattered countless artifacts across Europe, and many paths were never documented. But what matters now is where the stone is headed next.
After more than 80 years away from Italy, the tablet is finally going home. The FBI’s Art Crime Team is coordinating its repatriation to the museum it vanished from so long ago.
A forgotten relic in the weeds turned out to be a missing piece of ancient history — and soon, Sextus Congenius Verus will rest again where his story began.
