This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.

The discovery of a nearly 2,000-year-old Roman sailor’s tombstone wasn’t much of an excavation. It started as a backyard cleanup at a New Orleans home—and ended with the stone being handed back to Italy in Rome.

When Daniella Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, started clearing away brush in the yard of their home, they uncovered a marble slab with what appeared to be a Latin inscription carved into it. The slab turned out to be the grave marker of a Roman military sailor from the second century C.E., originally connected to the museum in Civitavecchia, Italy. How it ended up 5,250 miles away is still partly a mystery.

When Santoro, an anthropologist at Tulane University and the owner of the historic home on Cambronne Street in the Carrollton neighborhood in New Orleans, initially found the slab, she thought it could have been from one of the city’s historic cemeteries. She contacted D. Ryan Gray, professor of anthropology at the University of New Orleans.

“I never feel like I’ve seen it all,” Gray wrote on the website of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans. “There are always surprises and new mysteries to solve.”

This one came with World War II, garden decor, museum loss, and the F.B.I.

With no cemeteries close by, Gray asked for help from a colleague at the University of Innsbruck and scholars at Tulane to decipher the Latin. They independently concluded that the stone featured a Roman funerary inscription for a sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus.

The second-century C.E. inscription read: “To the Spirits of the Dead for Sextus Congenius Verus, solider of the praetorian fleet Misenensis, from the tribe of the Bessi [of Thrace], (who) lived 42 years (and) served 22 in the military, on the trireme [warship] Asclepius. Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, his heirs, made (this) for him, well deserving.”

More shocking: this inscription was already known in the world of anthropology. “In fact, a stone fitting that exact description was missing from the city museum in Civitavecchia, Italy, near where it had originally been found,” Gray said. “This was a bit of a surprise, and it changed the scope of our inquiries.”

After the backyard discovery and identification, the F.B.I.’s Art Crime Team got involved, picking up the one-foot-wide stone and keeping it in custody while the repatriation process kicked off to return the grave marker back to its original home.

That process is now complete: On April 29, 2026, the gravestone was formally handed over in Rome as part of a larger return of cultural property from the United States to Italy. Italian officials presented 337 repatriated items that day, from operations completed between December 2025 and April 2026. The New Orleans stone had become one small, weirdly domestic piece of a much bigger machinery: museum records, wartime loss, federal art-crime investigators, and a renewed U.S.-Italy cultural-property agreement.

Getting the stone back to the Italian museum was one thing, but figuring out how it got to New Orleans was another.

Gray started investigating the owners of the home from the 20th century, when the house stayed in the same family for much of the 1900s. Thanks to the U.S. Census, Gray deduced that Frank Simon purchased the house for his family in 1909 while he was working at a wholesale shoe company. His daughters, working as seamstresses, later owned the home. But those facts provided no clues as to how a stone moved from Italy to Louisiana.

With that dead-end in place, Gray turned to the next-door neighbor, a U.S. Navy veteran who served in World War II. That, too, was a non-starter, showing he deployed in the Pacific and was never stationed in Italy.

Susann Lusnia, associate professor of classical studies at Tulane, took the search to Italy, where she was already planning a summer research stint. She met with staff and curators at the city museum and learned that the headstone’s original site, northwest of Rome, had been a major Roman port and remained a port into the 20th century. Allied bombing raids targeted the city in 1943 and 1944, and the museum was destroyed. Collections were lost in the wreckage and confusion around the war.

Lusnia found that the marker was likely lost in the chaos after the war. She also confirmed that the 34th Division of the Fifth Army of the U.S. traveled through the town after the liberation of Rome, with units remaining in the area. That gave Gray a plausible route from Civitavecchia to an American household. It did not give him a name.

Local news did what archival digging couldn’t. A previous homeowner at the Cambronne Street site heard about the mysterious headstone and made the connection: she remembered placing the stone in the garden while planting a tree at her new house two decades ago.

“I just thought it was a piece of art,” said Erin Scott O’Brien, accordingto Preservation in Print. “I had no idea it was a 2,000-year-old relic.”

O’Brien’s grandfather, Charles Paddock Jr., served in the U.S. Army during World War II, stationed in Italy for a time. He returned to New Orleans in 1946 with his new wife, Adele, who he met in Italy. Charles taught at Loyola University and the tablet in question sat in a cabinet in his Baccich Street home. But with both grandparents passing in the 1980s, O’Brien didn’t know its significance. She ended up with what she thought was a decorative piece and added it to the backyard décor over two decades ago.

What remains unclear is how Paddock got it. Public follow-up reporting has not established whether he removed it, bought it, or acquired it some other way amid wartime or postwar disruption in Italy.

“I was really thinking we’d have our list of possible people through whom it could have ended up here,” Gray said. “I didn’t really expect to actually find the actual person, so it’s pretty exciting to know how it ended up here.”

While the person was found, the full handoff wasn’t. For now, the story is carved in a strange line across two continents: Sextus Congenius Verus died as a Roman sailor; his grave marker disappeared from a damaged Italian museum; it spent decades in Louisiana; and this year, it finally returned home.