A group of 27 silver Roman Republic-era coins has been discovered in the ancient Acropolis of San Marco and Santa Teresa on the island of Pantelleria in the Strait of Sicily. The coins are all silver denarii minted in Rome between 94 and 74 B.C. The first coins were exposed when rain disturbed the topsoil. The rest were found under a boulder during an excavation of the acropolis led by archaeologist Thomas Schäfer of the University of Tübingen. Schäfer and his colleagues have been excavating the site for 25 years, and in 2010 they unearthed 107 Roman Republican silver denarii from the exact same date range in that area of the acropolis. Schäfer believes the two coin finds were buried in a single instance. Schäfer hypothesizes that this small treasure was hidden during one of the frequent pirate attacks of the period: in those years, in fact, the campaign of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus was underway in the Mediterranean, who, on behalf of the Roman Senate, fought and destroyed the imposing pirate fleets. There were frequent raids against the villages along the coast and it is easy to imagine that someone hid the nest egg when the ships arrived, without being able to recover it. Spread over the twin hills of San Marco and Santa Teresa, the site contains the remains of the acropolis of Cossura (the Roman name for Pantelleria). The town was found by the Carthaginians in the 7th century B.C. and they built the acropolis on the hills and in the space between them. The Romans occupied the island in 217 B.C. during the Second Punic War. They put their own stamp of the acropolis, adding the Comitium, the meeting place for Curiate Assembly and the center of Roman political and legal activity. The Comitium has survived in good condition, one of only five known in the Roman world.