In the heart of Mozart’s baroque city, archaeologists have unearthed a treasure that predates Salzburg’s musical fame by over a millennium. During renovation work at the Neue Residenz in Salzburg’s Old Town, excavators discovered an exquisite bronze ship’s prow that once graced the walls of a luxurious Roman villa. Weighing approximately 1.5 kilograms and dating to the 2nd or 3rd century AD, this miniature warship bow represents the largest bronze artifact found in ancient Iuvavum since 1943 – a discovery that Salzburg Museum’s archaeology director Ulli Hampel describes as nothing short of “a sensation.”
The extraordinary find emerged from the debris layer of a collapsed Roman city villa in the Neue Residenz’s second courtyard, where Vienna’s Belvedere Museum is currently establishing a Salzburg branch. What makes this discovery particularly remarkable is not just its size, but its exceptional preservation. “Since the mid-20th century, we haven’t found such a large and comparable bronze artifact in the Salzburg/Iuvavum city area,” Hampel explained to Austrian media, emphasizing the rarity of ancient bronze objects of this magnitude.
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From Mystery Fragment to Maritime Masterpiece
The path to identifying this ancient treasure required exceptional detective work by Salzburg Museum’s conservation team. When first discovered, the deformed and fragmented bronze object puzzled archaeologists, who initially suspected it might be an oil lamp shaped like a ship’s prow. Only through meticulous restoration did the artifact’s true nature emerge.
