Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Antichità

In the first edition of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, the tipographic reproduction of the inscriptions was preferred – for economic reasons - to the graphic one, so that the connection between text and artefacts went lost. But a good epigraphic edition can’t do without photographs, and in the new edition of CIL, VI, starting from 1996, there is a complete photographic documentation.

For the inscriptions already published in the old volumes of CIL, VI, a new series of photographic volumes has been created, under the title Supplementa Italica – Imagines. Here the photos of still existing inscriptions are collected according to the place where they are preserved, the type of the artefacts where they are inscribed, and provided with complete explanations and indexes.

These volumes are a very important research tool, allowing not only to check the transcriptions of the texts, but also to value the connections between text and monument, and between written message and decoration.

Essential to this project has been and it will continue to be the contribution of the bibliographic archive of CIL, VI, constantly updated by the chair of Latin Epigraphy of the Sapienza University of Rome, and on the way to be completely digitised.