Aquileia, a colourful Roman city. The polychromy of Roman sculptures in the National Archaeological Museum of Aquileia

The National Archaeological Museum of Aquileia, a Roman city close to the Adriatic Sea, nowadays in north-eastern Italy, hosts a permanent exhibition of Roman sculptures with many traces of polychromy. The colours of mosaics and wall paintings of Aquileia are well known to the scholars, but the colours of the sculptures are widely unknown and rarely cited in literature. Among the sculptures with an easily recognizable polychromy (architectural decorations, funeral reliefs, statues), some were chosen, in order to give new and unpublished information about the colours on marble and stone of the Roman Aquileia. A head of Apollo, a female head, a funerary stelae of a young girl and other objects with traces of polychromy were studied with the support of archaeometric analyses (among them, FORS and Raman spectroscopy). This paper shows the results of the first and second campaigns of analyses, carried out in the museum of Aquileia between September 2022 and February 2023.