So come along with me and let's go inside this antiquarium and see what's going on
and why it's so important.
[FOREIGN] Well,
here we are in an area where there was a beautiful Roman villa
from about 15 BCE, and it had beautiful mosaics.
It was one of the biggest villas in the whole area of Umbria.
And it flourished, did very well for a little while,
but by the Third Century AD it went out of existence.
And it was used only, again, in the Fifth century AD as a cemetery,
where babies, only babies were buried.
And in this cemetery were amphorae.
The babies were buried in these jars.
Originally, these were transport jars.
They were used to carry the,
the just simply things like olive oil into this community up the Tiber river.
But unfortunately it also brought with it the mosquitoes that were
going to give Malaria to this area and around the middle of the 5th century AD.
The entire area was decimated In a terrible epidemic
that resulted in the burial of all these infants in these reused jars.