An artistic jewel of the ancient architecture comes into life again, it is visible for the public after almost five decades of difficult restoration works. The only example of inlay work of coloured marbles (opus sectile) almost totally recovered, belonging to the 4th century ad and coming from Porta Marina in Ancient Ostia will be today one of the highlights of the Museo dell'Alto Medioevo in Rome, where it will be displayed in a great hall with three sides out of four covered almost entirely by splendid marbles with intriguing and colourful animal drawings, flowers and geometrical reflections, and the original floor decorated with star-shaped drawings, octagons and circles combined with sumptuous elegance.The exhibition was inaugurated to the public this morning by the minister for culture Francesco Rutelly who was accompanied by the museum director Maria Stella Arena, by the supervisor in Rome Eugenio La Rocca and by the director of cultural goods in Lazio Luciano Marchetti. The rich decoration adorned one of the main halls of a monumental Roman palace at the end of the maximum decuman in Ostia (a very long road in Ostia), near the sea which the room itself was facing. In particular, there are splendid images of animals having a fight, mainly lions against gazelles, and the motif of a pergola on a horizontal line along the three sides of the hall, perhaps to indicate that hall, or at least the exedra at the end, was used as a triclinium, that is a banquet. There are also the paintings of two human figures. One of them could be the young owner of the house and the other one seems a classical image of Jesus, with an aureole, even if - according to experts - he could be a 'homus sacrus', a philosopher or a highly-esteemed thinker in that ancient age of passage from paganism to Christianity.