Overview

• Tulane anthropologist Daniella Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, uncovered the marble slab in March while clearing undergrowth at their New Orleans home.
• Experts identified the Latin inscription as honoring Sextus Congenius Verus, a second-century Roman sailor, and matched it to an item recorded missing from Civitavecchia’s city museum.
• The FBI Art Crime Team now holds the artifact as formal repatriation to the Italian museum moves forward.
• Archival work shows the Civitavecchia museum was devastated by Allied bombing in 1943–44, and a 1954 inventory citing the stone drew on older records rather than fresh accessions.
• Investigators suspect the stone left Italy in the wartime or immediate postwar period, but property and service records have yet to reveal who brought it to New Orleans.