It’s one of the most ancient examples of individual tomb in the urban context, excavated in via G. Branca on December 1885, during the excavations of a great main sewer.
It’s certainly the funeral monument of a Servio Sulpicio Galba, consul in the late republican period: he could be the important jurist and rhetorician elected in 144 B.C.or his son, elected in 108 B.C. The correctness of the second attribution could be confirmed by (from?) the “greek shrine” style, very popular at the end of the II nd Century B.C.
The inscription, clear and essential says like that:

"SERVIUS SULPICIUS GALBA
SERVIUS’S SON, CONSUL,
SQUARE FOOT 30"

The dimension (ped(es) quadr(ati) XXX) of the area, destined to  burial, has to be regarded really considerable for a single person, in a period of time when the urban tombs were collective and hypogean,  and it wants to emphasize the remarkable social importance of the personage.

The monument, made of Monteverde tufa with a peperino cornice and travertine tombstone, is nowadays kept in custody in the Antiquarium Comunale of Celio and originally it was straight facing a very crowded sidestreet of the via Ostiense, just at the entrance of the Galba family’s holding gardens , in front of the stately Porticus Aemilia.
On that area, while the tomb had being built, or a few years later, the so called Horrea Galbana ,the greatest foodstuff storehouses of the republican Rome, were erected.

(S. Della Ricca)

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