Fragmenta

The article suggests that both the end of the romantic phase of the Risorgimento and the consolidation of the new Italian nation are closely associated with a profound change in the meanings attributed to Mount Vesuvius and the remains of Pompeii. Until 1860 the suggestive power of the ruins of Pompeii evoked a desire to follow the seductive example of the good life in an antique culture. After 1863 the ruins and dead bodies came to be viewed as objects that acquired meaning only by the analyses of professional archaeologists. The author discusses this turning point by comparing the Pompeii of Alexandre Dumas, appointed by Garibaldi as Honorary Director of the Scavi and the Archeological Museum in the fall of 1860, with the Pompeii of Giuseppe Fiorelli, appointed as Director of the Scavi and the Museum by the Italian government in 1863.

America had a complex interaction of classical ideology and nationalism. It was never a ‘classical land’, yet used antiquity. Separation from Europe weakened Old World identity. After the Revolution and Republican foundation, classically educated leaders turned to Greece and Rome for ideological reference. Public and private buildings were done in classical style. Classical place names were used for new settlements and commemorative statues and war memorials used classical imagery. Late nineteenth century academic classicists increasingly emphasized Hellenic identity. Americans studied in Greece and brought Hellenic values back to classrooms. Excavations acquired an ideological identity. The American Athenian Agora excavations highlighted archaeology of democracy in the fascist era. In contrast the industrial elite identified with Rome and built railway stations modelled on Roman baths. American museums early acquired a strong classical orientation. An early emphasis on public education through casts gave way to elitism based on original objects.

The Musei Gregoriano Etrusco and Egizio in the Vatican were opened in the 1830s. The auctor intellectualis of these museums was Pius VII and the conceptualisation can be attributed to Antonio Canova who foresaw the Vatican collections as a future ‘Museum of the World’. The author compares these and the museums of Gregory XVI to the Egyptian and Etrurian collections in the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, and the Cabinet of Antiquities in Leiden. The underlying motives of the founding of these different collections can be explained in terms of these countries’ need for restoration and nationalism. Not surprisingly, the Etruscan finds from the Vatican were believed to form a introduction to the later Greek civilization that showed superiority over that same Greek civilization. Unexpectedly, the Egyptian collections, connected as they were with Roman history, precluded all attempts of appropriation of this culture elsewhere in Europe, most notably in France.

The author analyses the foundation and structure of the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, its main protagonists and scientific activities during the nineteenth century, a period rich of archaeological discoveries, and also of political and social change. The institute’s fields of interest included many elements: works of art, ancient architecture, topography, epigraphy and numismatics, which it collected and published. The paper also traces the institute’s transformation from a private and supranational organisation to a national institute.

Friedrich Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Prussia (king 1840- 1861) and Christian Carl Josias Bunsen shared a romantic passion for the city of Rome. Ever since their first meeting in 1827, the two men became close friends and exchanged ideas in an intimate correspondence. Bunsen, as the Prussian envoy to Rome, was an important confidant for the Crown Prince, serving as his main source of information regarding the theological, archaeological and topographical developments of the city. The Prussian Crown Prince was greatly interested in the archaeological excavations in Rome, especially on the Forum Romanum and the Imperial Fora. Bunsen’s scholarly researches helped provide the firm historical basis for some of the prince’s architectural endeavours in Berlin and elsewhere, i.e. the Museumsinsel and the Friedenskirche.

The authors present the geopolitics of French archaeological activity in the Mediterranean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Starting with the activity and function of the French schools of Athens and Rome, the paper also looks at the French mandate over Syria and Lebanon. The undertakings were various with excavations in Greece and in Italy, while they lacked the possibility to dig, they assumed a representative function. French archaeology abroad was motivated by the need to keep pace with their European rivals, to increase France’s scientific brilliance, and also answer the positivist ideal of the progress of knowledge. It was not driven by nationalistic ulterior motives as the definition of the French national identity was built more on home soil and archaeology — even the Gallo-Roman archaeology — was never fully used.

The author outlines a short history of the interrelationships between Italian and foreign prehistory scholars in the period going from the unification of Italy to 1945. There was a remarkable season of excavations and research during the second half of the nineteenth century that also helped to create a bond between the Italians and the scholars of other European countries. The beginning of the twentieth century was characterized by a progressive isolation of Italians studying their country’s prehistory. A new phase begins in 1940 with the excavations of Luigi Bernabò Brea in the Arene Candide cave and joint projects of archaeological research and excavations became a reality starting at the end of the Second World War.

Designated successor of the pontifical archaeologists, Rodolfo Lanciani interpreted the profession of archaeologist with the assumption of both technical-scientific and political functions. His professional career spanned a period that goes from the Italian national unity to the developmental stages of the Fascist regime. During his career, there were several urban, archaeological and cultural projects, determined by imperatives of the national policy that show clear ideological values and in connection with which the archaeological monuments of Rome played an active role of ideal reference. Specific episodes of Lanciani’s scientific and institutional activity are elaborated on with regard to national identity: the monuments and celebrations planned following the death of King Vittorio Emanuele II and the period during the First World War when his political role saw him actively engaged in promoting national values.

The article analyzes the antagonism between the idea of the German Archaeological Institute as a transnational research institution and the political ambitions various German governments invested in this organization. The almost exclusive state funding of the Institute’s work was intended, on the one hand, to promote a type of scholarship which continuously fascinated the public at large with its spectacular finds and promised answers to one of the central questions of humanity: Where do we come from? This objective required that scholarship be granted the greatest possible independence and generous funding. On the other hand, the work of the German Archaeological Institute was always conceived as part of German foreign cultural policy and financed primarily from the budget of the Foreign Ministry. The political aims the Institute was meant to serve were very different as well: sometimes they were imperialistic or steered close to Aryan-Germanic racism; at other times, they were to promote international understanding and cultural development.

The conflict between classical and prehistoric archaeologists in Germany has its roots in the nineteenth century but became bitter with the event of National Socialism. The German Archaeological Institute struggled with the Amt Rosenberg that claimed exclusive competence for prehistoric and ‘Germanic’ archaeology. The research programme on Italian ostrogothic and Lombard artefacts carried out by the Institute’s Roman branch and supervised by its second secretary and Nazi-activist Siegfried Fuchs can be interpreted as part of this struggle. The ‘Germanic research’ lead the Institute to co-operation with Himmler’s SS-Ahnenerbe and produced several publications that combined quite serious basic data with an explicit ideological interpretation. This ethnic approach seems to have been accepted by many Italian and other foreign scholars.

The author looks at Giulio Emanuele Rizzo, a professor of Classical Archaeology and his difficult relationship with the Fascist regime. The advent of fascism in Italy had a significant impact on its academic life. Scholars were forced to make difficult political choices sometimes leading to contradictory behaviour. While his political conduct never opposed him to the regime, Rizzo never fully accepted its directives on cultural and scholarly matters. The Fascist propaganda employed the heritage of ancient Rome to exalt its public image and to justify its policies, both domestic and foreign. Rizzo, however, in an official presentation delivered in 1929, openly expressed the admiration held by the Romans for Greek art. His relationship to the regime deteriorated and in 1935 he was dismissed from his chair at the Università di Roma. The study of Greek art became for him the expression of individual freedom and, in political terms, a form of intellectual antifascism.

This paper analyses the career of social activist, antifascist, and self-made archaeologist Umberto Zanotti Bianco and focuses on his archaeological activities in Magna Graecia in the 1920s and 1930s. Inspired by Mazzini’s ideas of cultural regeneration, he made ample use of his national and international network, including many aristocrats and scholars, to pursue his social, cultural, and scholarly objectives. In 1920 he co-founded the Società per la Magna Grecia, a private society that financed archaeological projects concentrating on the Greek past of Southern Italy. During the Fascist Era, the success of the Società created friction with the regime that ardently advocated Romanità.

This paper gives a reconstruction of the views of Dutch classical archaeologist Alexander W. Byvanck (1884-1970) on the archaeology of fascist Rome. Because of Byvanck’s many visits to Italy, especially the four travels he made in the 1930s with his students, and considering his special love for the city of Rome, Italian cultural officials probably had hoped that Byvanck would become a fellow traveller of Italian Fascism; something that never happened. Thanks to the philosophical basis of his work, in which the Volksgeist was the leading category, and his humanist and liberal vision on the socio-political position of academics, Byvanck was able to consider fascist archaeology as an un-academic phenomenon which was not to be discussed publicly.