Roman Wall Paintings Resurface Beside Sicily's Ancient Assembly Hall

Agrigento, Sicily — Archaeologists digging inside the Valley of the Temples have uncovered Roman Wall Paintings, fragments of painted plaster and pieces of stucco from a building that stood roughly two millennia ago, just south of the tiered assembly hall where free citizens of ancient Akragas once gathered. The team, from Italy’s Scuola Normale Superiore, was working in the Valley of the Temples Archaeological and Landscape Park when columns and a porch gave the first clue that a decorated structure lay beneath the soil. Among the finds is a stucco fragment showing part of a face, as reported by Archaeology News Online Magazine in October 2026.

The spot matters as much as the art. The ancient building stands beside the ekklesiasterion, the tiered seats where the free men of Akragas assembled to debate and vote, and close to the bouleuterion, the council house where the city’s smaller governing body met. According to You On Tour’s guide to the Valley of the Temples, these structures formed the political heart of the Greek city, while across the road the excavated blocks of the Hellenistic-Roman quarter show how the streets were laid out after the settlement became Roman Agrigentum. Finding brightly decorated Roman Wall Paintings here puts private taste or public grandeur right next to the old machinery of democracy. More stories from this era live in our Old World coverage.

This was the Normale’s third dig season focused on the buildings of Poggio di San Nicola, the hill at the center of the ancient city, and the work is supervised by Professor Gianfranco Adornato. The university has been digging at Agrigento since 2020, and this year’s campaign ran through September and into the autumn of 2026 as part of a seasonal school bringing together students, doctoral candidates and young researchers from Italian and international universities. This season’s haul of Roman Wall Paintings and stucco is the campaign’s most colorful result yet. The find was also flagged among the week’s notable classical discoveries, according to Rogue Classicism’s weekly bulletin.

The fragments come from what the team believes was a peristyle, a colonnaded courtyard at the center of a building, and they date to the first century BCE, when Sicily was already under Roman rule. Experts have sorted the colored plaster into the second and third styles of Roman wall painting, the two great decorative fashions that swept through Roman interiors in that era. The columns and porch that first caught the excavators’ eyes suggest a building meant to impress, whether it belonged to a wealthy household or to the city itself. Whoever commissioned these Roman Wall Paintings wanted anyone who entered to feel the weight of Roman taste.

Reading the Roman Wall Paintings: Two Styles, One Building

The two styles found at Agrigento tell different stories about how Romans wanted their walls to feel. The earlier of the two fashions loved illusion: painters created the look of receding colonnades, open windows and grand architecture on flat plaster, turning a dining room into a stage set. The later fashion went the opposite way, favoring flat, delicate ornament, slender candelabra-like motifs and panels of solid color floating on monochrome backgrounds. Spotting both in a single building is a clue that the interiors were redecorated over time, or that the owner had the means to hire painters working in the newest taste. Either way, the Roman Wall Paintings now coming out of the ground are not rough provincial work; they belong to the mainstream of Roman interior fashion, and their survival in fragments makes each piece of color precious.

Among the Roman Wall Paintings recovered so far, the star piece is small: a stucco fragment preserving part of a face, modeled in relief rather than painted flat. Roman stucco work often framed painted panels or crowned doorways with figures and ornament, so a face suggests the decoration went beyond flat color into sculpted detail. As the fragments are cleaned and studied, conservators should be able to say which rooms the pieces came from and how the color schemes were organized across the walls.

A Grand House or a Public Portico?

Here is the open question, and it is a good one. The remains could belong to a large private residence organized around its peristyle, the kind of showpiece home a rich family would build within sight of the old civic center. Or the building could have been a monumental public portico, a roofed colonnade tied to the Roman temple nearby. That second reading has a point in its favor: by this period the neighboring assembly seats had stopped serving their old public role, so a grand Roman complex rising on the edge of the retired hall would fit a city remaking its civic spaces under new rulers.

The research team plans to settle the question as study of the finds continues. Whether these Roman Wall Paintings hung in a grand mansion or a public colonnade, they put Roman color on a street that once rang with Greek votes — and like other recent digs, for instance a hoard of medieval silver that redrew a trade map, this one may end up rewriting what we thought we knew.

A Hill Used for Centuries

The Poggio di San Nicola dig is part of a longer story. The Normale’s teams have returned season after season to untangle how this central hill grew from a Greek civic district into a Roman one, and this campaign has already helped clarify the date and purpose of a complex that earlier work had begun to map. The same area also preserved the apse of a small early Christian basilica, once thought to be a simple semicircular recess, which shows the hill stayed in use long after the painted walls fell. Wall art, assembly seats, a church: the layers of Agrigento keep stacking up, and these newly surfaced Roman Wall Paintings are only the latest color to come back into the light.