Several trenches had already been dug by Luisa Bertacchi in the area under investigation in the central decades of the last century. These trenches were partly identified on the surface, a factor which consented their re-positioning on the overall plan of the area and to avoid them during the field work planning phase. After removal of plough soil the excavation brought to light a fairly homogenous layer of dump, comprising fragmented pottery, stone and brick, created for a re-use that has not yet been identified. Its removal revealed two splendid late antique mosaics in the northern area of the excavation. These belonged to the same building phase as a house which must have been part of a high quality residential area (it is in fact one of the first insulae north of the forum).
This find provided an extraordinary new aspect, that is, the possibility of dating this phase through the discovery of a perfectly legible coin. This was a posthumous emission of Constantine I, placed on the preparation layer of one of the mosaics (RIC VIII, p. 316 No.17, dated to between 337 and 340). This element will allow, on the one hand, a revision of the dating of several similar mosaics within the context of the corpus of the mosaics of the Regio X, and on the other to identify, with greater clarity, the presence of a very high quality domus in a period of Aquileia’s history for which the documentation is not very rich. The related stratigraphy identified a later phase of tessallated paving, less well made than the earlier one, which obliterates the phase with the 4th century pavements and could date to around the mid 5th century A.D., although the dating is still being studied. (Federica Fontana)