Day 19

Day 19 - Heritage

Link

https://en.osint4fun.eu/advent2025/20251219073000

Difficulty

medium

Rank

#45

Flags

Caius Sergius Orata Valerius Maximus si inde petere non licuisset in tegulis reperturum

A year and a few days ago, an association held an awards ceremony, and the choice of venue was no coincidence.

On the association’s website, an image illustrates this heritage. This image was intended to illustrate a book.

Welcome to one of the hardest challenge of this event! At least, for me!
First, let’s identify the location of the picture. From there, maybe we can find the association that did the ceremony here.

For once, Reverse Image Search gives no result. Instead, let’s search for what we can read on the plate: “Akademia Club & Event Ristorante Cocktail Bar”. Multiple results appears, but none seems to be the right location. Let’s search that on Google Maps instead.

From there, 3 results appears. One in UK, one in Hongary, and one in Italy. As its definitely written in Italian, let’s check the Italian one: Akademia Cucina and More.
By street-viewing on the road in front of the place, we can see the same sign. Bingo!

Let’s now search which association did a ceremony here during the end of 2024.
We need to search with some keywords and Google Dorks. We need to find a ceremony (“ceremonia”) of an association (“associazione”) at “Akademia Cucina” during December 2024:

1
"Akademia Cucina" "cerimonia" "Associazione" after:2024-12-01 before:2024-12-31

Every results are talking about an event held by the “AIOST”, like this one.
Searching for “AIOST” gives the official website. The URL, logo and footer of the site stand their full name : “Associazione Italiana Ostricari”. That must be it!

Now, we need to find the image “illustrating the heritage”.
On the site, the “Associazione” tab tells the story and origines of the association.
By scrolling down to the “LA STORIA” section, we can found a old-looking painting, that seems to be the one illustrating their heritage:

We now need to identify “who is depicted in the image”, and “who is the author of the book”. Easy right. Right? Yes, we did the hard part already!

By Reverse Image Search, the first result is from Wikipedia giving the name of the person depicted: Sergius Orata (with his full name on the page). However, there’s no information about any book. Open the illustration image on Wikimedia to find more information about it source. If there’s the author, it should be here!

Well, no author. However, we have the source of the painting! Let’s follow it!
The two first image are the same, but their description still doesn’t give any author. Let’s reverse image search again this Getty image to find more information about it.

In fact, one of the result on Alamy is a even larger image (yes, it was cropped twice). It is in French, but we can read the “Auteur” (author) on the description!

Right. Let’s get straight up to it. The book should be indexed somewhere online. As its mostly latin (and I don’t speak latin), let’s Google search some keyword names that will not vary between languages: Sergius Orata Crassus Valerius Maximus.

One of the result is from The Latin Library, written by Valerius Maximus. Perfect!

Searchin (CTRL+F) Crassus on the page gives us 3 paragraphs. The first one (9.1.1) contains both names “Sergius Orata” and “Crassus”. Let’s translate it to find the last 8 words of the story.

C. Sergius Orata was the first to establish suspended baths. Which, having begun with slight beginnings, he only penetrated the suspended waters of warm water, not the sea. Likewise, lest he should have his appetite subject to the will of Neptune, he devised special seas for himself, intercepting the waves in estuaries and enclosing the various schools of fish separately in piers, so that no storm so fierce would fall that the tables of Orata would not abound with a variety of dishes. He also built spacious and lofty buildings on the shores of the Lucrinian lake, which was deserted at that time, so that he might enjoy the more recent use of shellfish: where he immersed himself with greater eagerness in the public water, and obtained a judgment with the publican Considius. In which case Lucius Crassus, arguing against him, said that his friend Considius was mistaken, because he thought that Orata, being far from the lake, would be full of oysters: for if it were not permitted to go from there, he would find them on the tiles.

TL;DR: They are fighting. Nice, that’s what we’re looking for.

Now let’s take the last 8 words of the paragraph without punctuation (one dot and one comma), and that’s it!

Thanks god I can now close the 30+ tabs I opened for this challenge…