Funerary patterns on Late Roman Cities (3rd to 7th centuries). Reviewing archaeological data in northern Italy

One of the principal transformations underlined by researchers analysing urban landscape during late antiquity concerns changes in funerary patterns and the progressive development of intramural burials, a phenomenon that has traditionally been linked to processes of Christianisation, the construction of churches inside cities and particularly a change in the relationship between people and the bodies of the dead, especially those of martyrs and saints (Ariès 1977; Brown 1982). In this paper I shall try to demonstrate that between the 4th and the 6th century the existence of burials inside the city walls is rare and almost never related to Christian buildings. At least in northern Italy roman and Ostrogothic populations continued respecting roman traditions, burying their dead in existing cemeteries located in suburban areas outside the city walls. Some of these burial areas had existed since republican and imperial times and contained pagan and Christian burials alike. Others seem to have been created, again in the suburbs, during the 3rd century and developed a century later into large Christian areas. Real changes in burial practices inside the city would only begin from the end of the 6th century with the multiplication of scattered burials and the development of intramural cemeteries linked to private chapels and, more rarely, episcopal churches.