Lucia Maria Orlandi is an archaeologist and historian specialising in Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium. Trained in Classics and Archaeology, she holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Heritage Studies (2017), awarded under the joint supervision of the University of Bologna (Italy) and the Sorbonne University (France). She has held research positions in Italy (University of Bologna, 2017-2019), Greece (Italian Archaeological School at Athens, 2019) and France (Sorbonne University/Unité Mixte de Recherche 8167 Orient et Méditerranée, 2020-2022), and has participated in several excavation projects in Italy (Central Italy, Catholic University of Louvain, 2010-2017) and Greece (Crete and Kos, University of Bologna, 2012-2019), focusing on Late Antique housing and settlement and Early Christian religious architecture. She has been a teaching assistant at the Sorbonne (Byzantine history) and at Cergy Paris Université (Roman history), and has participated in several digital humanities projects funded by national research funds or by the European Union, dealing with Byzantine cultural heritage and Byzantine lead seals. Currently, Dr Orlandi is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the École française de Rome, with a project entitled “SIGN-IT - Signacula in Roman and Post-Roman Italy: marking religious and cultural identity (2nd-11th c. CE)” (HORIZONMSCA- 2023-PF-01-01-GA Id: 101146566), which aims to facilitate the study of Roman and Byzantine signacula or markers as a historical source for the social and cultural history of the Italian peninsula. Dr Orlandi’s main research interests are Roman to Early Byzantine epigraphy and sigillography; baptism and baptisteries and the social implications of Christian initiation between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages; interreligious relations, religious topography and settlement dynamics in the Late Antique and Early Medieval Mediterranean; databases and data management of archaeological and documentary sources.

“I am very happy and grateful to participate in this volume and the Conversation. This has not only allowed me to return, at least in thought, to places and research topics that are close to my heart and have shaped my education and research, but also to open new windows onto the history and lived experiences of a place with inexhaustible human richness. Have a great journey, all of us readers.”

Lucia Maria Orlandi