Besides Curtius, teachers such as Franz Boll, Alfred von Domaszewski, Karl Meister and especially Bernhard Schweitzer gave her a broad-based knowledge of antiquity.

[4] Speier graduated with a doctorate in archaeology and a double minor in ancient history and classical philology in 1925 under Curtius[3] with a dissertation titled Die Gruppen angelehnter Figuren im V. und IV.

Working in the tradition of Johann Joachim Winckelmann's methodology, she used scientific analysis to show that art reflected the historical development of culture and government.

[7] Pope Pius XI signed her contract,[7] though initially it was for no fixed term and at a daily rate,[8] as both a statement against Nazi antisemitism and the taboo of employing women.

[4] The first task was to divide the 20,000 photographic negatives into three separate collections named Classical Archaeology, Medieval and Modern Times, and Ethnographic Missions.

Then she and her colleagues, archaeologist Filippo Magi and the art historian Deoclecio Redig de Campos, began to classify the images, and deal with the constant flow of incoming new photographs.

[10] Nobile returned to Rome in May 1942[16] and her family severed communication with Speier after learning of her Catholic baptism, effectively ending her reasons for emigration.

[7][17] During the German occupation of Rome 1943/1944 Pope Pius XII made arrangements for Giulio Belvederi, nephew of the former Pontifical Master of Ceremonies Pietro Respighi, to hide Speier in the Catacombs of St. Priscilla, under the nunnery.

[20] When it reopened, she continued with her work creating a detailed monuments inventory of the Vatican holdings, which resulted in several important finds.

[4] She published Die Skulpturen des Vaticanischen Museums (The Sculptures of the Vatican Museums) in 1956 about the find of the Parthenon horse's head, and earlier in 1950 had published a distinguished report concerning the excavations of St. Peter's Basilica[18] in Herbig's Vermächtnis der Antiken Kunst (Legacy of Ancient Art) entitled "Die neuen Ausgrabungen unter der Peterskirche in Rom".

[4] As a result of her immense knowledge of ancient monuments, from the mid-1950s until the early 1970s Speier was entrusted by the German Archaeological Institute with the publication of the fourth edition of Wolfgang Helbig's guide to the public collections of classical antiquities in Rome (Führer durch die öffentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altertümer in Rom), which had not been updated in half a century.

[citation needed] She lived near the Vatican on the Janiculum in a comfortable apartment with a roof terrace which had been put at her disposal by her lifelong patron Erich Boehringer.

[24][21] She held a cultural salon there, inviting guests such as Marie Luise Kaschnitz, who dedicated a poem to Speier; de:Engelbert Kirschbaum, a noted archaeology professor; Paul Augustin Mayer, a German Cardinal and Oriol Schädel, head of the Library of the Piazza di Monte Citorio, among others of the German and Italian intelligentsia.

[8] Her grave bears a piece of a Tarentum clay relief which she had wanted to publish about as early as 1937 in the Festschrift Corolla Ludwig Curtius.