A life-time of Deliciae Fictiles, from antefixes to roofs and beyond (1990-2024)

After 35 years of Deliciae Fictiles conferences architectural terracottas remain essential for the study of the ancient world and continue to shed light on architecture, religion and arts and crafts in Central Italy. The conferences started in 1990 at the Swedish Institute in Rome and was the first conference focusing entirely on architectural terracottas from Central Italy. It was a sequel to the earlier Greek conference in Athens in 1988 and was inspired by it. As a very young scholar in the topic of ancient roofs, I attended bot h conferences and realized that these gatherings and exchanges were essential to the study of architectural terracottas, not only to encounter the academic discourse in this material field but also to acknowledge the existence of so many new discoveries and categories. This was the main reason that the Dutch Institute in Rome took the initiative to continue the line of conference in 1996, followed by initiatives at the American Academy in Rome in 2002, again the Dutch Institute in 2009 and the latest one at the Museo Archeologico in Naples in 2018. The topics expanded from single categories of roof elements, such as acroteria, to the inclusion of architectural terracottas from the whole Italian peninsula, to the final combination of roofs from the whole Eastern part of the Mediterranean, including Greece and Turkey. The initiative to continue the line of Deliciae Fictiles conferences this year in Tarquinia, and refocus on new and old discoveries, returning to Central Italy, is very important for the field. In the introduction to this new conference I will try to reflect on the history of the study of ancient roofs and emphasize its importance and influence on modern research in the archaeology of Central Italy from the early Archaic period into the Roman world, re-reading and re-thinking the Deliciae Fictiles conferences.