STONE OF THE MERKATOR VINARIUS

The funerary stone (second half of the 1st century A.D. ) is adorned in the upper part by a bas-relief tympanum, its interior part  shows a round shield superimposed on two crossed lances, as on the back side of the altar of Castricia Saturnina. The marble slab of the Val Varaita was inserted into a sandstone base.
In the epigraph (inscription) we can read that the freedman Marco Lucrezio Cresto, ascribed to the Palatine tribe (in which people of this social category were frequently included), had commissioned for himself the sepulchre,the extent its area of relevance is given: 15 square feet (about 1.15 metres per side).
The freedman also declares his profession as a wine merchant, thus attesting not only the commercialization of this beverage but also probably  vine growing at that time in this territory.
The stone was unexpectedly found by Edoardo Mosca on the second day of the first excavation campaign directed by him (1958) in the necropolis that was named after the nearby farm of the Pedaggera. In the same necropolis, hundreds of graves were discovered in the following decades (e.g. excavations by the Superintendence 1989-90) as well as the aqueduct in the masonry of river pebbles.