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Staff Profiles

Dr Thea Ravasi

Visiting Researcher

Background

Areas of interest

  • Roman Architecture: analysis of complex monumental (including imperial palaces), religious (baptisteries), and domestic buildings, focusing on construction processes, architectural design, and the spatial, functional, and cultural dimensions of built environments.
  • Urban Archaeology: Integrated approaches combining excavation, structural analysis, geophysics, and 3D modelling to analyse and reconstruct infrastructure, spatial organisation, and long-term urban transformation.
  • Digital Modelling: data integration, spatial analysis, transparency and reproducibility.
  • Roman Economy: integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of construction processes (especially brickwork) and their economic and social implications, alongside research on amphora trade.
  • Roman collecting and display practices: analysis of statuary and relics, examining their collection, display, ideological and cultural significance.
  • Interdisciplinary research at the intersection of archaeology and contemporary art, exploring Roman wall painting as dynamic environments shaped by spatial experience.


Responsibilities

Director of the Peopling Roman Palaces project at UNESCO World Heritage Site of Hadrian's Villa (Tivoli, Italy)


Background

  • PhD in Roman Archaeology, Università degli Studi di Perugia (Italy)
  • 3 Years Postgraduate Diploma in Classical Archaeology, Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy).
  • 4 years Degree in Classics and Archaeology, Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy).


Outreach

Classics EPQ at Newcastle | T&L Resources Gertrude Bell Exhibition | T&L Resources Expanded Interiors | My Research Podcast | ArchaeoTrek |


EDI

Fawdon and Coxlodge Together


Profiles

ORCiD | Academia | ResearchGate | Linkedin

Research

My research spans the Roman West, with a particular focus on Rome and Roman Italy, and centres on Roman architecture and its social, political, religious and cultural dimensions from the Mid-Republican period to Late Antiquity. My current research focuses on the interplay between elite display, servile infrastructure, and resource management within palatial complexes such as Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli and the Sessorian palaces in Rome’s Eastern Caelian. I direct the Peopling Roman Palaces project at Hadrian’s Villa (2024-ongoing), which investigates the overlooked spaces of the working population and the infrastructures that sustained daily life in imperial residences. I also lead a collaborative study with the University of Calabria on the Economy of imperial construction in Rome and Latium (2nd–5th centuries CE), assessing imperial investment in building materials and construction practices. As Visiting Researcher at Newcastle University I am co-editing volumes on urban change, thermal and religious architecture, water infrastructure, and courtly logistics from the 1st to 8th centuries CE for the ERC-funded Rome Transformed project (2019-2025).


Research Profiles

ORCiD | Academia | ResearchGate


Current Research


Architectures of Service: Labour, Space, and Hierarchy in Roman Imperial Palaces (2024–ongoing)

I direct the Peopling Roman Palaces project at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Hadrian’s Villa (Italy). The project aims to investigate social hierarchies, security, and lived experience within imperial residences. This research explores the architecture and infrastructure that sustained these vast complexes, shifting attention from the long-celebrated ceremonial quarters to the often-overlooked spaces of the working population (Ravasi in press; Ravasi et al. 2025). By examining how servants, administrators, artisans, and guards inhabited and animated these environments, the project reframes imperial palaces not only as symbols of power but also as dynamic, lived spaces where organisation, innovation, and daily life converged.


Quantifying the economy of Roman imperial architecture (2024-ongoing)

I lead a project which addresses a key aspect of imperial architecture: the economy of imperial construction. In collaboration the University of Calabria, the project conducts a large-scale mortar study of imperially sponsored buildings in Rome and Latium from the 2nd to 5th centuries CE, a period marked by intense building activity. Through comparative qualitative and quantitative analysis of lime–volcanic ash mortars, it reconstructs sourcing strategies and levels of imperial economic investment across military, hydraulic, and residential projects. By establishing whether materials were procured centrally and redistributed or obtained locally, the project illuminates the organisation and transformation of the imperial construction economy from the High Empire to Late Antiquity. It also compares results from imperial residences with elite properties on the Eastern Caelian to assess their possible integration within imperial building networks (Ravasi, Larussa et al. in press).


Visualising Urban Transformation: Archaeology and Digital Integration in Rome's Eastern Caelian (1st–8th c. CE) (2019–2025)

As Archaeology Research Associate of the ERC funded Rome Transformed project, I studied the transformation of the urban layout of Rome’s Eastern Caelian between the 1st and 8th centuries CE. My work focused particularly on structural analysis, data integration and visualisation (Haynes, Ravasi et al. 2023), the design of the Sessorian Palace (Ravasi, T., & A. De Santis, eds. in preparation. The Sessorian Palace in Rome: Unravelling Transformation of an Imperial Residence in Rome’s Eastern Caelian. Oxford: Archaeopress), elite housing (Ravasi in press; Ravasi, T. & P. Liverani, eds. in preparation. The Multifaceted Nature of Rome’s Eastern Caelian: Transformations of a Residential District from Suburban to Urban. Oxford: Archaeopress), and the Late Antique transformations of the Lateran Baptistery from a thermal complex into a religious building (Ravasi T. Baptising under Constantine in Rome. In Preparation).


Roman Collecting and Displaying Practices

My interest in the design of sculptural display and collecting practices in Roman imperial residences stems from my PhD research on the sculptural display of Hadrian's Villa (Ravasi 2015a; Ravasi 2015b) and continues to inform current scholarship (e.g. Elsner 2018; Vout 2018; Beard 2023; Wheeler 2025). A new article reassesses collecting and relic display as mechanisms of imperial authority in Christianised Rome and Constantinople (Ravasi submitted).


Past Research


Interdisciplinary integration of archaeological research and contemporary artistic practice in Pompeii and Herculaneum (2018-2019)

As Archaeology Research Associate of the Expanded Interiors project I worked on the interdisciplinary integration of archaeological research and contemporary artistic practice, contributing to the spatial analysis of Roman domestic interiors and the interpretation of wall paintings and artefacts from the House of the Cryptoporticus in Pompeii and the House of the Beautiful Courtyard in Herculaneum (Italy), and the development of site-specific installations through 3D documentation and reconstruction.


Romanisation, Trade and Economy in Northern Italy during the Republic and Early Empire (2002-2018)

My research extends to Romanisation and the economy in Northern Italy, investigating broader transformations in production and consumption as suggested by the distribution of oil, wine, and garum fish sauce from the Republican period to the 2nd century CE. I have published extensively on Roman trade and economy in the Po Valley and on Roman Republican and early Imperial amphorae from the colony of Cremona (please check my publications here).


Logboats and the Archaeology of Inland Navigation in Northern Italy (2009-2010)

As curator of the city museum of Crema, Italy, I directed a research that focussed on the study of logboats, investigating their construction, use, and environmental context to reconstruct patterns of inland navigation and landscape connectivity in northern Italy.

Teaching

At Newcastle, I have served as second supervisor for the following PhD dissertations:


At Newcastle, I have taught the following modules (2010-2019):

  • (UG) CAC1012 Classical art and archaeology 
  • (UG) ARA2091 The Archaeology of the Roman Empire 
  • (MA) ARA8050 Graduate Seminar in Roman Archaeology
Publications