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#MosaicMonday presents us with a pair of particularly grotesque #gladiators, now in the floor of the Salone of the #GalleriaBorghese in #Rome. These may be caricatures of gladiators, famous for their gigantic physiques. They come from a #mosaic #pavement from an imperial #villa.

#EpigraphyTuesday takes us north to #Milan, ancient #Mediolanum, to see a lovely bit of Julio-Claudian official script, raised upper-case "I"s and all, in honour of the empire's darling #Germanicus, prospective heir of #Tiberius, except it didn't work out that way.

#ReliefWednesday leads us to the #CastelloPiccolomini in #Celano in western #Abruzzo, where the enormous #Torlonia fiefdom of #Fucino occupies the drained bed of the Fucine Lake. One of the finds from the draining is this amazing C2 #relief of a city and its surrounding land.

#FrescoFriday this week celebrates the restoration, and, hoefully, the reopening of an interesting site of the #Janiculan hill: a #Severan #latrine decorated with delicate #fresco work. 📸 Sovrintendenza Capitolina.

This #sarcophagus could tell us a story for #SarcophagusSaturday, of a piece of imported #Greek #marble, carved rather indifferently (unfinished?) with Stygian waves, and used to bury a small child in #Trastevere. The scratched-in #inscription hints that it was a poor burial.

#SpoliaSunday on a hot June afternoon takes us down into one of the most delightful spots in #Rome, the #Nymphæum of the #VillaGiulia, where we, like pope Julius III, can be refreshed by the sound of the #fountains and admire the #pavement of #marble #spolia.

At night on the #Palatine in #Rome, suddenly a huge #mosaic is lit up and visible from the terrace atop #Hadrian's extension of the #domusTiberiana, a tantalising hint of the decoration of these rooms of the #imperial bureaucracy.

For a belated #ReliefWednesday as I wait in #Catania airport for my flight to #Rome, my smile eerily resembles that of this #terracotta #antefix from a civic building in the ancient #Greek centre of #Tauromenion, today's #Taormina. It was found buried beneath the #Roman baths.

#FrescoFriday takes us under the ruins of some late-antique #baths in #Tauromenium, #Roman #Taormina, to discover some rather fine #swamp #ducks.

Well, did you evah? What a swell children's party this is, for #SarcophagusSaturday. Two seated figures on either side, one missing her face, seem to be imitating the roles of #Ariadne and #Dionysus. This child's #sarcophagus shows an earthly metaphor for a joyous afterlife.

For #SpoliaSunday an ancient #statue is transformed into an #altar and is only rediscovered after a massive #earthquake brings down the #cathedral of #Catania in 1693.

#MosaicMonday offers us a huge #geometric #mosaic #floor in #blackandwhite as part of the guest quarters or #Hospitalia. This was not a dining hall - that's next door - but a shrine or #sacellum for his middle-level guests to pay their devoirs to the divine.

#EpigraphyTuesday at the #CapitolineMuseums in #Rome gives us the beautiful white and grey marble #funerary #altar of an imperial freedman from probably the reign of #Hadrian. This must have cost the freedman's presumptive heir, the dedicator, a denarius or two.