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This article deals with the fundamental problem of working in Ostia : how to devise a respectable chronology for a city that was mostly cleared of soil in a few years, with the aid of railways and poor families, for the World Exhibition of 1942. In the absence of photographs and serious notes, we have little to fall back on. I offer a field methodology against despair, applied to the difficult case of the Palaestra. What we need to do is clean up large areas, establish phases between them, and undertake selective excavation of pottery-rich rubbish deposits. From the resultant Harris Matrix, a more nuanced history of Ostia can emerge, of late antique centuries, extending far beyond the « Hadrianic » fantasy of Mussolini. The scale of this exercise makes it possible to assess the reliability and relative utility of different dating methods. Most early methods now fail, but others remain. It seems that future chronology will depend on an uncomfortable cohabitation of old and new.

The “Prima Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d’ Oltremare” was inaugurated on 9th May 1940 and closed after only one month because of the burst out of the war. It inserted itself in the current of the colonial exhibitions which were necessary to create in Italy the consent on the colonization and to launch on the global scenery the image of Italy like a big colonial power. In the setting up of the “Triennale”, the archaeology had to show the historical legitimacy of the conquest of the overseas territories welding the feats of the Ancient Rome to those of the Fascism. Nevertheless this task is not clearly evaluable since it is not known with precision which and how many works there were positioned. In this place it is reconstructed the composition of the setting up on the basis of the examination of the administrative acts. It is retraced the complex events of the postwar restitutions of the works coming from the ex-territories of the Empire, Libya, Greece and Albania. Attention is drawn to Amedeo Maiuri, who was the researcher of the section “Roma Antica sul mare” and of that of the Italian Isles of the Aegean Sea.