Tulane professor’s discovery comes full circle as Roman artifact returns home, is prepared for museum display

A 1,900-year-old Roman gravestone believed lost during World War II has returned to an Italian museum more than a year after a Tulane University professor identified the artifact found in an unlikely place: a New Orleans backyard.

The marble tablet, identified by Tulane University archaeologist Susann S. Lusnia after it unexpectedly surfaced in New Orleans in March 2025, has now been reunited with the Italian city it disappeared from and is being prepared for public display at the National Archaeological Museum of Civitavecchia. The tablet will be one of the featured artifacts when the museum reopens Sept. 18 following an extensive renovation.

For Lusnia, a professor of classical studies in Tulane's School of Liberal Arts, the inscription's installation in the museum marks the final chapter of an extraordinary journey that captured international attention.

"When I first received the picture of the gravestone more than a year ago, I got that tingling in the spine and knew this was something very exciting," Lusnia said. "To find something that had been missing for this long that was still intact and be able to get it back to its original location, it's a very satisfying thing to have been part of. I'm glad I could help."

The second-century A.D. tablet honors Sextus Congenius Verus, a sailor in the Praetorian fleet stationed at Misenum, near Naples. It was discovered in 1866 near the ancient Roman port city of Centumcellae, now Civitavecchia, and became part of the city's civic museum collection before disappearing after the museum was destroyed during World War II. For decades, scholars believed the artifact had been lost forever.

That changed in the spring of 2025 when Tulane anthropologist Daniella Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, uncovered the stone while landscaping the backyard of their New Orleans home. After noticing Latin inscriptions carved into its surface, Santoro contacted Lusnia.

Lusnia quickly recognized that the lettering and wording matched authentic Roman funerary inscriptions. She searched ancient epigraphic databases using key phrases from the text and confirmed that the slab was the long-lost funerary monument of Verus, documented in scholarly records but missing since 1943.

"Searching online databases, it didn't take long to find out where it had come from," Lusnia said. "I reached out to contacts I had in Italy and was eventually connected with the museum in Civitavecchia. I told them, 'We think we have something that belonged to you once long ago.'"

The discovery quickly garnered international attention. Lusnia was interviewed by media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, BBC, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine and USA Today as the mystery of how a Roman artifact ended up in a New Orleans backyard fascinated audiences around the world.

The owners of the artifact voluntarily agreed to return it to Italy, launching an international collaboration involving the FBI's Art Crime Team, the Italian Consulate General in New York, Italy's Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage and Italian judicial authorities. The inscribed tablet was repatriated to Italy in April 2026.

Now, with the reopening of the National Archaeological Museum of Civitavecchia, the tablet has been cleaned and reunited with the collection it left more than 80 years ago.

"This restitution represents a significant example of international cooperation in the protection of cultural heritage and makes it possible to reunite with the collections of the National Archaeological Museum of Civitavecchia - an institution of the Regional Directorate of National Museums of Lazio - an object of exceptional historical, documentary and cultural significance," museum officials said in a release issued by the Regional Directorate of National Museums of Lazio.

The tablet will become part of the museum's redesigned permanent exhibition, which traces more than 3,000 years of Civitavecchia's history through archaeological artifacts, multimedia displays and interactive exhibits.

For Lusnia, the inscription's return is more than the conclusion of a remarkable archaeological detective story. It restores an important piece of Roman history to the community where it was first discovered nearly 160 years ago and ensures that future visitors will once again be able to see a monument that many believed had been lost forever.

"The fact that something can be missing for so long and then be rediscovered and returned is a joyful moment," Lusnia said. "You never know what you can find in your backyard."