Felicitas Iulia Olisipo

• Autor(a) principal: Fabião, Carlos
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/50554

The paper presents a brief synthesis on how was built the actual knowledge about the Roman town of Felicitas Iulia Olisipo, underneath modern Lisbon (Portugal). An Atlantic city located in the mouth of Tagus River, and a major port of Lusitania. Felicitas Iulia Olisipo was first just one town name in classical literature. A place of some relevant historical events described by Strabo and also a place of mirabilia, according to Pliny the Elder. Was also a place name inscribed in some Latin epigraphs recorded by scholars. From the actual Ancient Roman town, just the notice of one Roman dam was mentioned, in the context of all the studies related to the new water supply system that should be done to Lisbon. Documents and studies about the water supply system, from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries always put on the table the hypothesis of following the ancient Roman piping. It looks like the Roman aqueduct was still visible in those times, at least in some of its sections. After the great 1755 earthquake, the reconstruction of the town revealed a couple of monumental public buildings. First, a cryptoporticus that now we know was the substructure of the monumental Bath house of the Port, then another great public baths, the so called thermae cassiorum, from an epigraph found there; and, at the end, the theatre. Despite some intents from an Italian Architect to preserve in situ the theatre ruins, all three monuments were not preserved. On one hand, due to the necessity of building the new town of Lisbon, on the other hand, for all the political instability of the early Nineteenth Century (the Napoleonic invasions and the displacement of the Portuguese crown to Brazil, then the civil war between Liberals and Absolutists). These discoveries related to the rebuilding of the town are important for the knowledge of Felicitas Iulia Olisipo major public buildings, but it is rather strange why no private houses with stucco paintings and mosaics and neither the fish salted tanks related to the fish processing factories, archaeological structures that we now know are very frequent at the down town, were noticed and recorded during the huge process of reconstruction. It looks they didn’t attracted the scholars attention. From the second half of Nineteenth Century to de end of Twentieth Century, few attention or protection was payed to the Roman town. Some rescue excavations were done: at a large necropolis and at some remains of the circus found during the works to set the first Metro network or the Roman theatre once again discovered, but no actual policy for archaeological remains preservation was settled. In this period, many studies were published on the history of Lisbon, some with relevant interest to the better understanding of the Roman town, but they deal chiefly with already published information, not searching nor using new fresh data. At the end of the Twentieth Century, when Lisbon was the European Cultural Capital (1994), a great exhibition done, named “Subterraneous Lisbon”, was important to put the Archaeological remains underneath the modern town on the media agenda and in full display to the so called general public, but it was also a clear proof of the few progresses in the Roman town knowledge all over de Twentieth Century, as the exhibition exposes chiefly what was already known at the beginning of the Century, with no relevant fresh information besides the recognition of the relevant fish processing (salsamenta) industry of Felicitas Iulia Olisipo. In the last decades, the changing in Portuguese archaeological activity legislation produced a major change. We pass from some accidental rescue excavations to contract excavations to be done previous to any subsoil intervention. We pass also from amateur and academic archaeology to professional archaeology. Many different agents in many different conditions and situations worked from then on in Lisbon. The major renewal of the historic buildings, increased chiefly by touristic demand, produced a huge amount of new excavations. Nowadays the Roman town is better known day by day by the several urban excavation done in the context of urban rehabilitation. Unfortunately, excavations are much more than the recommended publication of the results and there is some lack of truly historical knowledge coming from all that activity. We have now much more dots related to Roman occupation in the modern urban map, but those dots didn’t mean truly information about the historical sequences of building / transformations / abandonment, what we expect to know from any archaeological excavation. In the last years Lisbon municipality was aware of the problem and creates a new institution, the Centro de Arqueologia de Lisboa (CAL), aiming to centralize and managed the huge amount of new information generated by the new excavation dynamics. The CAL launch a new cycle of Conferences on Lisbon Archaeology (two of them already done and a third one in preparation) with the aim of sharing information about the progresses of urban archaeology (not just about the Roman period, but all periods considered). It was launched a research / divulgation Project, Lisboa Romana / Felicitas Iulia Olisipo with a coherent program of publication and dissemination of the knowledge on the Roman town. So, we may be optimists about the future of the knowledge of the many towns underneath the modern Lisbon, including Felicitas Iulia Olisipo.