Italian officials unveiled the discovery of a 2,000-year-old basilica that archeologists have attributed to Vitruvius, the ancient Roman architect, at a press conference on Monday, according to a report in Reuters.
The ancient basilica, which would have been used as a public building in ancient Rome, was built at Fanum Fortunae and completed in 19 BCE. It is the only known building by Vitruvius and is referenced in De architectura, the only treatise on architecture to survive from antiquity. Vitruvius would later be immortalized in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man drawing, which mapped the architect’s ideals of portion onto the human body.
Despite the basilica’s fame, the structure’s exact location was eventually lost to time. Andrea Pessina, who is the superintendent of archaeology and fine arts for the Pesaro and Urbino province, described the discovery as an “absolute match” to Vitruvius’s descriptions of the building. When the team unearthed the four columns of the rectangular building’s shorter side, they used those descriptions to calculate where the top-right column of the longer side should be and found it immediately, Pessina said, adding, “The are few certainties in archaeology … but we were impressed by the precision.”
“It is a sensational finding,” Italy’s culture minister Alessandro Giuli said via a video link during the conference, “something that our grandchildren will be talking about.” He also described it as the “the Tutankhamun of the 21st century,” referring to the discovery of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb in the early 20th century, and that history would now be “divided between before the discovery of the Basilica of Vitruvius and after the discovery of the Basilica of Vitruvius,” according to a report by ANSA.
The basilica was unearthed in the town of Fano, located on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, about an hour south of San Marino. “I feel like this is the discovery of the century, because scientists and researchers have been searching for this basilica for over 500 years,” the town’s mayor, Luca Serfilippi, said during the conference.
