Ancient Roman Grave Marker Discovered in New Orleans Backyard Placed by US Soldier's Heir

The ancient Roman grave marker recently discovered in a garden in New Orleans appears to have been received and placed there by the granddaughter of a American serviceman who served in Italy during the second world war.

Through comments that all but solved an international historical mystery, the granddaughter informed area journalists that her ancestor, the veteran, kept the ancient artifact in a cabinet at his residence in New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood before his death in 1986.

The granddaughter recounted she was unsure exactly how her grandfather acquired an object documented as absent from an museum in Italy near Rome that misplaced the majority of its artifacts during second world war bombing. Yet the soldier fought in Italy with the American military throughout the conflict, married his wife Adele there, and came home to New Orleans to pursue a career as a vocal coach, she recalled.

It was fairly common for troops who were in Europe in World War II to return with keepsakes.

“I just thought it was a piece of art,” O’Brien said. “I didn’t realize it was an ancient … artifact.”

Regardless, what O’Brien initially thought was a nondescript marble piece turned out to be passed down to her after her grandfather’s passing, and she put it as a garden decoration in the back yard of a house she acquired in the city’s Carrollton neighborhood in 2003. She neglected to retrieve the item with her when she moved out in 2018 to a husband and wife who discovered the relic in March while clearing away brush.

The husband and wife – researcher Daniella Santoro of the academic institution and her husband, Aaron Lorenz – understood the artifact had an engraving in Latin. They sought advice from academics who established the artifact was a headstone honoring a approximately ancient Roman sailor and serviceman named Sextus Congenius Verus.

Additionally, the group learned, the headstone matched the account of one documented as absent from the city museum of the Rome-area town, near where it had initially uncovered, as an involved researcher – University of New Orleans expert Dr. Gray – explained in a column published online recently.

Santoro and Lorenz have since turned the headstone over to the federal investigators, and attempts to return the item to the Italian museum are under way so that institution can exhibit correctly it.

O’Brien, who resides in the New Orleans area of Metairie suburb, said she remembered her grandfather’s strange stone again after the archaeologist’s article had been reported from the global press. She said she reached out to journalists after a phone call from her previous partner, who informed her that he had come across a news story about the item that her ancestor had once possessed – and that it actually turned out to be a artifact from one of the world’s great classical civilizations.

“It left us completely stunned,” O’Brien said. “The way this unfolded is simply incredible.”

The archaeologist, however, said it was a comfort to discover how the Roman sailor’s gravestone traveled behind a house more than a great distance away from Civitavecchia.

“I was really thinking we’d have our list of possible people through whom it could have ended up here,” the archaeologist stated. “I didn’t really expect to actually find the actual person – so it’s pretty exciting to know how it ended up here.”