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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polychromy (architectural decorations, funeral reliefs, statues), some were chosen, in order to give new and unpublished information about the colours on marble and stone of the Roman Aquileia.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.

Recently, some museums started seeing in a new light their collections and searching for overlooked traces of painted colours: one example is the National Archaeological Museum of Aquileia, in north-eastern Italy, a Roman city close to the Adriatic Sea. Among the sculptures with an easily recognizable polychromy, five were chosen (three statues, a funerary relief and a fragment of architectural decoration), in order to give new and unpublished information about the colours on marble and stone of the Roman Aquileia between the 1st century BC and the 3rd century CE, with the support of a multi-analytical approach (imaging, FORS, Raman and microsamples).