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Portus Romae was established in the middle of the first century AD and for well over 400 years was Rome's gateway to the Mediterranean... Lead author, Dr Tamsin O'Connell of the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge said, "The human remains from the excavations at Portus belong to a local population involved in heavy, manual labour, perhaps the saccarii (porters) who unloaded cargoes from incoming ships. When looking isotopically at the individuals dating to between the early second to mid fifth centuries AD, we see that they have a fairly similar diet to the rich and middle-class people buried at...

Beneath Rome's Fiumicino airport lies a "mini-Colosseum" that may have played host to Roman emperors, according to British archaeologists. The foundations of the amphitheater, which are oval-shaped like the much larger arena in the heart of Rome, have been unearthed at the site of Portus, a 2nd century A.D. harbor near Ostia's port on the Tiber River. A monumental seaport that saved imperial Rome from starvation, Portus is now reduced to a large hexagonal pond on a marshy land owned by a noble family, the Duke Sforza Cesarinis. The two-square-mile site has been known since around the 16th century, but...

Scholars discovered the 100-yard-wide (90-metre-wide) canal at Portus, the ancient maritime port through which goods from all over the Empire were shipped to Rome for more than 400 years. The archaeologists... believe the canal connected Portus, on the coast at the mouth of the Tiber, with the nearby river port of Ostia, two miles away. It would have enabled cargo to be transferred from big ocean-going ships to smaller river vessels and taken up the River Tiber to the docks and warehouses of the imperial capital. Until now, it was thought that goods took a more circuitous overland route along...

Archeologists have discovereed an ancient Roman canal, theme of the Romans, connecting the town of Portus, on the mouth of the Tiber River, to the river town of Ostia. According to the Telegraph: "Scholars discovered the 100-yard-wide (90-metre-wide) canal at Portus, the ancient maritime port through which goods from all over the Empire were shipped to Rome for more than 400 years.