ARCHEOLOGY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 234, 26 October 1877, Page 17

AR CHE OLO G Y.

The readers of the Tablet (London) will remember an account given some months ago of the very interesting discoveries made by Mgr. Crostarosa in the catacombs under his property on the Nomentan Way. Signor Mariano Armellini has now published an account of these discoveries, and has given eleven photographic plates of the most important monuments brought to light by his skill during the excavations made by Mgr. Crostaxosa. The ancient archaeologists and all |&c modern authorities until Father Marchi were accustomed to give V name of "Cemetery of St. Agnes" to all the necropolis lying •Syond the Basilica of St. Agnes, on the left hand side of the Via Nomentana, and which extends beneath the property of Mgr. Crostarosa and of Signor Leopardi, who recently bought the confiscated lands of the Augustinian Monks of S. Maria del Popolo. But the learned Commendatore Giovanni-Battista De Rossi was led by his studies of ancient writers to make a distinction between the catacombs which are those of St. Agnes proper and the rest, and to give to the latter the name of the Cimitero Ostriano. Pope Liberius mentioned this Ostrian cemetery as the one in which St. Peter baptised. The conclusions of De Rossi have now received notable confirmation from the discoveries of Crostarosa and Armellini. The last-named archaeologist has found traces of the name of the Apostle in an inscription painted in large red characters on the apsis of one of the crypts, where tradition recorded the first chair of St. Peter to have been placed — Scdcs qua primum, Roma sedit. Moreover, in the same cemetery, De Rossi said lay the burial place of the martyr Enierentiana, and in the same inscription Armellini found the name of Emerentiana, the foster-sister of St. Agnes. It may be mentioned that Mgr. Crostarosa, the proprietor of the land beneath the surface of which lie these catacombs, has spent large sums of money in excavations. He is likewise most active in the cause of education of the poor, and maintains at his own sole cost an excellent school in Rome for the children of the poor. — Tablet.