Veleia Romana Guide 2025: The Buried Roman City in the Emilian Apennines

How the 1747 discovery of the Veleia Tabula changed Roman archaeology — and how it was almost lost to a fire

The discovery of the Tabula Alimentaria Veleiana in 1747 (the excavation by local farmers in the Lugagnano Val d'Arda fields that uncovered the 2.4-meter bronze tablet): the most consequential single Italian archaeological find of the 18th century and the one that established the systematic study of Roman epigraphy (the academic discipline of reading and interpreting Roman inscriptions) as a distinct scholarly field. The immediate consequence: the Duke of Parma Filippo di Borbone purchased the Tabula immediately on news of its discovery, brought it to Parma, and commissioned the German classical scholar Barthold Georg Niebuhr to produce the first systematic reading and interpretation of the text — the resulting publication (1766) was the first work of modern classical epigraphy and established the methodology that Theodor Mommsen would later develop into the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (the complete collection of all known Latin inscriptions). The near-loss: in 1944, the Allied bombing campaign against Parma damaged the Palazzo della Pilotta complex that housed the Tabula; the Tabula survived because the museum staff had moved the most significant bronze objects to the reinforced basement storage in 1942 in anticipation of air raids — one of the most specifically documented single acts of wartime cultural property preservation in Italy.