For #SpoliaSunday this week we return to the treasure-filled sacristy corridor of #SantaMariainTrastevere in #Rome, where we find a child's #sarcophagus having a second life as part of a priestly washbasin.

For #MosaicMonday we're peering into the corners of an apsidal room at #VillaAdriana to find the one remaining trace of #polychrome #mosaic so far discovered still in situ in #Hadrian's Villa, leaving us to imagine the intact version. #Rome #Tivoli Tivoli (IT)

Lictor? I never touched 'er. #EpigraphyTuesday brings us back into the refreshingly cool tunnel under the #Campidoglio which houses the #epigraphy collection of the #CapitolineMuseums. Here we meet Caecidius Celer, a lictor (probably familiar to T. Corey Brennan), and his family.

#ReliefWednesday takes us the the #BibliothèqueNationale in #Paris where we find this splendid #cameo from #Rome, from the early reign of #Claudius. He gained the throne via the #Praetorian guard, not by familial succession, so he wore a laurel crown to stress his legitimacy.

#FrescoFriday takes us into the endless collections of #EvanGorga, a man fascinated by all aspects of all the past. Here we find a #fresco with an #oscillum, one of the many pieces turned up by the builders' diggers as #Rome convulsed with new construction after becoming capital.

#SarcophagusSaturday presents us with a curious C4 CE #sarcophagus in the upper courtyard of #VilladEste in #Tivoli near #Rome. It's entirely covered with strigillation. Is this purely decorative, or is it making a statement about belief in the pagan Styx in a Christian world?

This #SpoliaSunday, we're descending into a chapel built into a lost imperial palace in #Rome, to admire the surprisingly clingy and revealing dress of St Helena, mother of the emperor #Constantine, in an audacious piece of C18 #spolia.

For #MosaicMonday a magnificent #opussectile floor from the #VilladeiQuintili down the #Appia from #Rome. Though this became an imperial property under #Commodus, it was built in the 120s CE by the brothers Quintilii, showing that rich aristocrats could compete with emperors.

For #EpigraphyTuesday a statue base of the empress #Helena, mother of #Constantine and sexy saint (c.f. last Spolia Sunday), in the basilica of S. Croce in Gerusalemme in #Rome. I love the particular capital T of #Constantinian #epigraphy.

For #ReliefWednesday we're at an exhibition on theatre in ancient #Rome at the #AraPacis museum, where the familiar snub-nosed face of #Silenus stares at us from across 2500 years, in the typical Latial-Etruscan style of the turbulent period of the end of the #monarchy.

For #FrescoFriday, a strange archaising detail from a bedroom in the #Augustan imperial villa of the #Farnesina in #Rome, where a staring crowned face in #fresco might be an #oscillum with a #Medusa head, or some other slightly menacing #apotropaic figure.

As with many a #sarcophagus, this could be valid both for #SarcophagusSaturday and #SpoliaSunday. Its scene of masculine virtus, and an unusual hunt scene, would seem inappropriate for the #medieval tomb of a beautiful girl - but beauty requires beauty, in #Viterbo as in #Rome.

For #SpoliaSunday we're back at Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in #Rome to see a reworked ancient #capital converted into a #font and then, as a #relic, into part of a modern altar base in the underground chapel next to the more famous chapel of St Helena.

Shocked, I tell you, I'm shocked! This #mosaic from the ancient site of #Privernum, a #Roman colony on the coastal plains of southern Latium, is this week's #MosaicMonday feature. Fragmentary as it is, it shows what the wealthy colonial elite could produce, even outside #Rome.