Progetto Doclea, Montenegro. Un'antica città romana con un futuro da ricostruire

The Roman town of Doclea (Montenegro) was founded as Roman municipium in the 1st cent. AD in a plain surrounded by hills and delimited by three rivers, at 3 km from the modern capital Podgorica. Excavated at the end of 19th cent. and during the 20th cent., Doclea was an important city, the second one of Roman Dalmatia for dimensions. The forum, thermae, temples, private houses, and three medieval churches are still visible. Some modern interventions, as the construction of a railway passing through the archaeological site during the Forties and the missing of conservation and enhancement politics, are risking the integrity and the use of the site, that represents one of the most important monuments for the Montenegrin cultural identity. Since 2016 the Institute for Ancient Mediterranean Studies (ISMA) and the Institute for Technologies Applied to Cultural Heritage (ITABC) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), in collaboration with the Historical Institute of Montenegro - University of Montenegro (HIM) and under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, started a series of integrated activities in order to launch new scientific researches and a conservation and enhancement project. The project 'ArcheoLab Italia Montenegro' will be illustrated here. It provides the collaboration among experts in different disciplines: archaeologists, historians, historians of art, architects, topographers, geophysicists, in order to improve the knowledge and the appreciation of a site still unknown from many points of view.