The chapter analyzes, through case history, the evolution of online communication in the cultural sector, which has been increasingly developing in recent years. The numerous online platforms available allow a potentially enormous diffusion of cultural contents and allow reaching a very wide audience. Even the archaeological sector has adapted to the new media, but creating a good strategy is often not a simple thing. The blogging platforms, associated with a good use of social media, allow you to practice the right communication of archaeological sites, museums, and places of culture, improving the knowledge and participation of the public, and above all countering the diffusion of fake news.
TopCommunication On An Archaeological Excavation In Progress: Aquinum Site
About 120 km south of Rome, in the middle of the Liri valley, stood the ancient city of Aquinum, which was a municipium in Cicero’s time and a colony in Marco Antonio’s and Lepido’s time (1st Century BC).
Nowadays the site has been of historical interest since the beginning of the twentieth century. The area in which stood the city, covering most of the municipal territory of Castrocielo, is characterized by a low level of urbanization and an agricultural tradition. On the one hand this has allowed that conspicuous monumental remains pertaining the urban area were preserved (the theater, amphitheater – literally cut in two halves due to the construction of the A14 motorway -, the capitolium, the apsidal building, the square tower, the “Porta Romana”), but on the other hand it has encouraged a continued removal of remains, artifacts, architectural fragments belonging to the ancient Roman city. Some artifacts are exposed in the Archaeological Museum of Aquino, while most of the fragments have been incorporated in historical buildings and modern constructions.
During the years, such a strong presence of archaeological remains has involved several historians and archaeologists. Among them, Giuseppe Ceraudo, archaeologist and professor at the University of Salento, enables the launch of the “Ager Aquinas Project” in 1998, a cooperation between Salento’s Athenaeum and Lazio’s Authority for the Archaeological Heritage with the support of the municipalities of Aquino and Castrocielo (FR), in order to examine the area by means of systematic surface investigations (topographical and geophysical) to increase in depth the knowledge of the site.
In 2005, thanks to an inheritance of a five-hectare field (later become seven-hectare large) in favor of the Municipality of Castrocielo, located in a central position as compared to the perimeter of the ancient city, the conditions to carry out the archaeological investigations were set up. In 2009 the first excavation campaign was so launched which will be repeated every year continuously until today.
The excavations have soon given their first important results: in the concerned area, located in the district of San Pietro Vetere, not far from the theater and the capitolium, the first remains of what will be later identified as an enormous thermal building, have been found immediately, exceeded in size only by the Imperial spa in Rome, which, according to the epigraphic finds, will be called “Terme Vecciane”.