It started like a simple yard cleanup in New Orleans’ Carrollton/Riverbend – pull the vines, clear the weeds, find the fence line again.
Instead, Dr. Daniella Santoro, a Tulane anthropologist, and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, unearthed a heavy marble tablet etched with Latin abbreviations and ancient names.
As Santoro told Meg Farris of WWLTV, she never imagined it was authentic at first – maybe a decorative stove stone, a garden oddity at most.
The shock came quickly. Once photos were shared with classical scholars, the letters snapped into focus. This was a funerary inscription from imperial Rome.
And not just any inscription.
The Sailor, the Ship, and the Fleet at Misenum
Dario Radley of Archaeology News reports the translation was swift and unanimous among experts, including Tulane’s Dr. Susann Lusnia and Harald Stadler of the University of Innsbruck. The text reads like a compact biography:
“To the Spirits of the Dead for Sextus Congenius Verus, soldier of the praetorian fleet Misenensis, from the tribe of the Bessi (of Thrace), (who) lived 42 years and served 22 in the military, on the trireme Asclepius. Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, his heirs, made this for him, well deserving.”
Radley notes the piece is a genuine second-century CE funerary marker – about a foot wide and a little longer – commemorating a sailor of Rome’s Mediterranean fleet, stationed at Misenum near Naples.
It is precise, unambiguous, and deeply Roman: a life summarized in service, tribe, ship, and the pietas of heirs.
The inscription is specific enough that specialists quickly tied it to a long-lost artifact.
A Museum Destroyed, a Marker Missing
According to Radley, Dr. D. Ryan Gray of the University of New Orleans traced the inscription to an item once documented in Italy. A nearly identical headstone was exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum of Civitavecchia, an ancient port northwest of Rome.
Then came World War II. The museum was destroyed in an Allied bombing. The marker for Sextus Congenius Verus was listed as missing.
This sets up the mystery that Meg Farris frames so clearly on WWLTV: how does a 2,000-year-old Roman gravestone – missing since 1943 – end up behind a New Orleans shotgun house?
The first wave of leads turned up dead ends. Radley reports that an earlier property owner, Frank Simon, died in 1945 and didn’t fit the likely profile for transatlantic antiquities. A neighbor had Navy service – but only in the Pacific. The path from Civitavecchia to Carrollton stayed stubbornly foggy.
Then came the break.
The Family That Forgot a Roman Artifact in the Garden
In a follow-up that went viral, Meg Farris spoke with Erin Scott O’Brien, whose family once lived in the Riverbend house where Santoro found the slab. As O’Brien recounted, the marble marker had been passed down from her grandparents. They set it outside when they moved in, planting a tree beside it.
And when they sold the home in 2018?
They forgot it in the backyard.
The family connection tightened. O’Brien’s grandfather, Master Sergeant Charles E. Paddock, had served in the USO Special Services in Italy during and after the war. He married Adele Vicenza Pioli, an Italian artist and violinist, in 1946.
O’Brien’s uncle remembers the marble slab displayed in a Gentilly cabinet decades ago. No one really discussed where it came from. It was just one of granddad’s “interesting collectibles.”
Farris’ earlier report had already established the scholarly chain – Tulane’s Lusnia emailed the Italian museum and even visited, saying, in effect, “We think this is yours.”
Now the family narrative gave the most plausible handoff: a wartime acquisition in Italy, kept as a keepsake, then quietly inherited and forgotten by a backyard fence.
If this all feels serendipitous, that’s because it is. O’Brien told WWLTV she had no idea it was a 2,000-year-old artifact tied to a destroyed museum. And if the family hadn’t left it behind—and if the buyers hadn’t been an anthropologist and her husband – it may never have been identified or repatriated.
Scholars, Stone, and a Swift Repatriation
Radley notes that the team worked with the Antiquities Coalition and contacted the FBI Art Crime Team, which now holds the headstone.
Plans are underway to return it to Italy. Farris reports the museum anticipates a summer ceremony when the marker for Sextus Congenius Verus goes home.
Along the way, the scholarship mattered as much as the luck. Santoro’s discovery triggered a small phalanx of experts – UNO’s Ryan Gray, Tulane’s Susann Lusnia, international collaborators like Harald Stadler – who knew where to look and who to ask.
As Santoro told Farris, all the tech in the world couldn’t replace the work those PhDs did: “The Internet… and AI… could not have located and understood this object if it was not for them.”
That’s a lesson worth underlining. Databases help. But provenance is a human craft – people with languages, memory, and the patience to comb bombing records, museum catalogs, and war-era photo archives.
And this is where the story gets quietly moving. Curators in Italy, according to Radley, were ecstatic to learn the stone had survived the war and would come home. For them, it’s not just a returned artifact.
It’s a fragment of a shattered institution – evidence that not everything lost in 1943 was gone forever.
War, Loot, and the Gray Areas of Memory
The obvious question is whether the tablet was looted. Radley is careful with the line. Wartime chaos in 1944 created opportunities for illicit trade and casual “souvenirs.”
Soldiers and civilians alike pulled objects from ruins – sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. Families lived with those objects for generations without interrogating their origin stories.
The O’Brien family’s recollection fits that messy reality. A serviceman stationed in Italy, an Italian bride, a postwar marriage in 1946, and a historically rich object that became a conversation piece in a New Orleans living room. Then a garden stepping-stone. Then a viral mystery.
It’s a reminder that not all provenance is nefarious. Some of it is unexamined. And when the chain is uncovered, repatriation can be a good-faith act by people who never imagined they had a museum piece in the hydrangeas.
The Man on the Stone Becomes a Person Again
What lingers for me is the inscription itself, the way Roman epitaphs compress lives into a handful of facts that outlast empires.
Sextus Congenius Verus, of the Bessi – a Thracian tribe known to Roman writers – served 22 years aboard the trireme Asclepius in the Misenum fleet. He died at 42. His heirs, Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, did right by him: “bene merenti” – well deserving.
For decades his stone sat under glass in Civitavecchia, a port once called Centum Cellae. War leveled the museum. The marker disappeared. Then, across an ocean and two generations, it rose out of a tangle of backyard vines.
Thanks to Radley’s reporting and Farris’ on-camera legwork, the sailor has a path home. The scholars have a win. The family has closure. And New Orleans – city of layers, inheritances, and improbable finds – gets to add “Roman tombstone” to its long list of objects that shouldn’t be here and, somehow, are.
This whole saga pivots on two accidents. One wartime, one domestic.
The first scattered a museum’s collection into smoke and rubble. The second left a marble marker in a backyard long enough for the right person to buy the house and recognize what it was.
Everything in between – Santoro calling Lusnia and Gray, Gray tracing a lost catalog entry, Lusnia writing the museum, the FBI Art Crime Team stepping in – turns a curiosity into a restitution. As Farris said on air, it’s the kind of story that makes you want to go dig in your own backyard.
Maybe you’ll find a Mardi Gras doubloon.
Or maybe, just maybe, the past will decide to surface.
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The article 2,000-year-old Roman tombstone found in New Orleans backyard first appeared on Survival World.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, John developed a love for the great outdoors early on. With years of experience as a wilderness guide, he’s navigated rugged terrains and unpredictable weather patterns. John is also an avid hunter and fisherman who believes in sustainable living. His focus on practical survival skills, from building shelters to purifying water, reflects his passion for preparedness. When he’s not out in the wild, you can find him sharing his knowledge through writing, hoping to inspire others to embrace self-reliance.
