“Valete vos viatores”: a Digital Humanities project for disseminating Roman Epigraphy
Javier Andreu Pintado (Universidad de Navarra)
Seminario di Cultura Digitale – Mercoledì 7 dicembre 2022

The University of Navarra, with funding from the European Union’s Creative Europe programme and the participation of the Universities of Coimbra (Portugal), Bordeaux (France) and La Sapienza de Roma (Italy), is developing the project “Valete vos viatores: travelling through Latin inscriptions across the Roman Empire”. The project aims to bring the Roman epigraphic heritage closer to the general public through a virtual museum and a video game (created and managed by the Trahelium studio) and an audiovisual series produced and directed by Clau Creative S. L. In addition, a final publication, compiles the experience of the work team in the application of the Humanities Digital to the study of Roman inscriptions and the transfer of their main values, builders of European identity, to society. A large part of these materials can be accessed from this web site

The project aims to provide tools that make it possible for the general public – with special attention to young people – to travel from Rome to the finis terrae of the West in Antiquity, the province of Lusitania, discovering the unique tones with which the stones “speak”, making up the different provincial epigraphic cultures of the Latin West. All this, highlighting in this journey the peculiar features of the way in which the epigraphic habit took shape in the different regions of the old Latin Europe and the general patron saint that Rome, by contrast, gave to the habit of engraving inscriptions in the whole of the West.

In order to narrow this journey and make it moreover attractive, the participating universities chose as partners museums and epigraphic collections which are attractive and which, in recent years, have been growing steadily: the Museo Nazionale Romano, perhaps the largest lapidarium in the Roman West, in Rome; the Museé d’Aquitaine, in Bordeaux; the Arquivo Epigráfico de Egitânia, in Idanha-a-Velha, Portugal; and the highly epigraphic archaeological projects of Los Bañales de Uncastillo (Zaragoza) and Santa Criz de Eslava (Navarra), in the ancient province of Tarraconensis.

Link: https://www.unav.edu/web/valete-vos-viatores