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Latin inscriptions in the church of Sant' Ambrogio

Part of an old brick wall with several dozen fragmentary Roman inscriptions embedded in it. It is a wall of the forecourt or atrium of the church of S. Ambrogio in Milan, Italy.
The walls of the forecourt of St. Ambrose's church in Milan,
like those of many Italian churches, are a sort of epigraphical museum.


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The inscription recording the career of Pliny the Younger or a fragment of it anyway. Pliny was a local official in Como, about 60 km from Milan. What are the holes? What's this inscription doing here??


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The inscription on this tombstone, presumably of a Roman Jew, opens with a menorah. And if the technique used to incise the letters is any guide, the stonecutter may not have known how to write; at any rate, the spelling mistakes may tell us something about the pronunciation of Latin in the third century.

Page updated: 17 Apr 98