Scatola Archeologica di Piazza Albania

Its own site records that the earliest evidence on the site goes back to the foundation of Rome in the eighth century BC, and that between the sixth and third centuries BC a tufa-block wall was built, read as a watchtower inside the fortifications, whose monumental remains are visible today at piazza Albania and in via di Sant'Anselmo. A late-third-century-BC intervention raised the ground level with earth and debris that yielded a great deal of contemporary ceramic. By the mid-second century BC a domus began to develop inside a massive opus incertum wall, turning the area from military to residential use; living quarters, food-storage rooms and water-disposal systems have been identified, and six superimposed floor levels from the first century BC to the second century AD record successive owners, perhaps merchants engaged in the Tiber Emporium trade. Some of the rebuilding appears linked to unstable subsoil, cut through by quarries for tufa and pozzolana.