The complex ancient and post-classical history of the so-called 'Stele del Palestrita' in the Gregorian Profane Museum, a Greek work in Pentelic marble datable to the decades immediately following the mid-5th century BCE, can be reconstructed, not without some lacunae and uncertainties, on the basis of the physical transformations undergone by the marble and with reference to the iconographic and historical documentation available. The reproduction of the figures of the athlete and the pais in a woodcut of the Simulachrum of Marco Fabio Calvo, allows us to date the rediscovery of the monument in the post-classical period to the years before the sack of Rome in 1527 and to hypothesize its provenance from a context of re-use in the Roman period. Drawing on a reference appearing in Georg Fabricius of Chemnitz's Roma and through re-examination of 16th-century sources on the antiquities of Rome, this paper reconstructs the existence of a topographical connection between the Vatican stele and the area of the Quirinal hill called Bagnanapoli/Magnanapoli.
These are the ancient ruins near the Torre delle Milizie pertaining to the complex of Trajan's Markets, once interpreted as the remains of ancient private baths. It is suggested, therefore, that the rediscovery of the monument played a major role in the topographic identification of the Balnea Pauli. Based on the stele's probable provenance from the area of Magnanapoli, this paper proposes some reflections on its possible reuse in the Roman period, hypothesizing – by analogy with other Greek reliefs found in Roman contexts of reuse – that it may have belonged to the sculptural decoration of a luxury residence, possibly to be identified as one of the aristocratic domus documented archaeologically in this area.