The truth behind how an ancient Roman tombstone ended up in a New Orleans backyard has finally been uncovered. Daniella Santoro and partner Aaron Lorenz were baffled when they discovered the 1,900-year-old artifact in their Louisiana backyard back in March. They traced it back to a Roman sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus and found that it had been missing from a museum in Italy since the 1940s. Now, following local enquiries, a woman named Erin Scott O’Brien revealed her granddad had brought the tablet home from Italy after World War II, and it sat in a display case in his home until his death in 1986. O’Brien said she later repurposed the tablet as a garden decoration, but forgot to take it with her when she moved house in 2018. “I just thought it was a piece of art,” she told local media. “I had no idea it was a 2,000-year-old… relic.” Lorenz and Santoro have handed the relic over to the FBI’s art crime team, and efforts are underway to repatriate it to the Civitavecchia museum, where it can be properly displayed once more.
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