L’habitat rupestre di Rometta tra Tardoantico e Medioevo: i luoghi di culto

The contribution focuses on the rocky settlements of Rometta and in particular on two units traditionally known as places of worship: the basilica in contrada Sotto S. Giovanni and the hypogeum in contrada Sotto Castello. Investigating these sites is not an easy task, due to the difficulties in defining their typology (e.g. the basilica was identified either as a church or as a mosque, not considering the transformations connected with its non-cultic use) and their chronology. These are typical problems connected to this kind of archaeological research, concerning structures carved out “in negative”. The study of rocky environments also raises problems related to the particular distribution of the spaces: the archeological survey and the geometric representation of these complex shapes and highly irregular surfaces are a challenging task. Therefore, such research requires careful methods of investigation (analysis, cataloguing, survey), in order to reconstruct the stratigraphic sequence of these continuously reused spaces, which becomes even more difficult in cases like Rometta, where the absence of frescoes doesn’t help us with a chronological classification.