THE STORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY IN ITALY PAUL MacKENDRICK ST MARTIN’S PRESS · NEW YORK Copyright © 1960 by Paul MacKendrick All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-8767 Manufactured in the United States of America By H. Wolff, New York TO MY WIFE...

This book owes much to many: to the Trustees of the American Academy in Rome, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Research Committee of the University of Wisconsin Graduate School, for giving me the opportunity to spend three years in Italy; to Laurance and Isabel Roberts, for hospitality and moral support; to Axel Boëthius, for friendship and instruction; to Ernest Nash, for photographs and advice; to Mrs. Inez Longobardi, the best and most helpful of librarians and friends;

In May of 1945 two young British Army officers, John Bradford and Peter Williams-Hunt, based with the R.A.F. at Foggia in the province of Puglia, near the heel of Italy, found that the World War II armistice left them with time on their hands. Both trained archaeologists, they readily prevailed upon the R.A.F. to combine routine training flights with pushing back the frontiers of science. The result of their air reconnaissance was to change profoundly the archaeological map of Italy. The value o

Between Tiber and Arno there flourished, while Rome was still a collection of mud huts above the Tiber ford, a rich, energetic, and mysterious people, the Etruscans, whose civilization was to influence Rome profoundly. Their riches have been known to the modern world ever since the systematic looting of the fabulous wealth of their underground tombs began, as early as 1489. Visitors to the Vatican and Villa Giulia Museums in Rome, and, better still, the Archaeological Museum in Florence, can mar

Everyone remembers that Augustus left Rome a city of marble, but too few people recall that he found it a city of brick. The picture of Rome in most people’s minds is of a marble metropolis, proud mistress of a Mediterranean Empire. This to be sure she eventually became, but the archaeological evidence is that until the end of the third century B.C. Rome looked tawdry, with patched temples and winding, unpaved streets. To trace the development is fascinating, and archaeology is our chief guide.

Rome’s wall begun in 378 B.C. took twenty-five years to build. However secure she might feel behind it, immediately beyond the gates lurked enemies. To the north the Gauls, to the east and south, Italic tribes (whom Rome successively feared, rivalled, dominated, and invited to partnership; of these the Samnites were the most fearsome), on the seas the Syracusan and Carthaginian navies—all represented a clear and present danger. Rome’s population being inadequate to keep legions in the field, muc

The aftermath of Sulla’s second march on Rome in 83 B.C. was a spate of political murders and confiscations. The profits were enormous, and Sulla used them for the most ambitious building program in the history of the Republic. His motive was in part the desire to rival what he had seen in the cities of the Greek East, in part his understanding that massive building projects are the outward and visible sign of princely power. And so he monumentalized the same Forum in which he displayed the seve

In 1922, after the success of the Fascist march on Rome, Benito Mussolini felt acutely the need for an aura of respectability to surround his upstart régime. Another swashbuckling condottiere , 1965 years earlier, Caesar’s heir Octavian, had felt the same need. Both resorted to the same method: an ambitious building program, and a vigorous propaganda campaign designed to substitute for dubious antecedents a set of more or less spurious links with the heroes of the glorious past. About Fascist ar

Roman historians branded the Julio-Claudian successors of Augustus—Tiberius ( A.D. 14–37), Caligula (37–41), Claudius (41–54) and Nero (54–68)—as a hypocrite, a madman, a fool, and a knave. The hypocrite spent millions rehabilitating Asia Minor after an earthquake, the madman provided Ostia with a splendid aqueduct, the fool built for the same city a great artificial harbor, the knave rebuilt Rome—after burning it down first, his enemies said—with a new and intelligent city plan. But it would be

One day in 1711 a peasant digging a well on his property in Resina, on the bay five miles southeast of Naples, came upon a level of white and polychrome architectural marbles, obviously ancient. This chance find led to the discovery of what proved to be the buried town of Herculaneum, destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius of August 24, A.D. 79. Workmen digging in 1748 by the Sarno canal, nine miles farther along the bay, found bronzes and marbles on a site which an inscription, discovered fiftee

Two fora , an amphitheater, an arch, a sculptured relief, a palace, a stadium: these may stand as typical of archaeology’s contributions to our knowledge of the Flavian age. As in the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the buildings and the sculpture epitomize the atmosphere of the time, the last three decades of the first century A.D. After the excesses of Nero and the bloodbath of A.D. 69—a year of civil war which saw three Emperors in succession, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, raised to the purple and then

Archaeologically speaking, the most important sites in Italy to illustrate Roman events and the Roman way of life in the happy reign ( A.D. 98–117) of Trajan—called Optimus Princeps , “best of princes”—are the port of Ostia, which in his time reached its apogee, and his Forum, the last and grandest of the Imperial Fora. Our present knowledge of Ostia, extending far beyond the early castrum discussed in Chapter IV, is due in large part to the devoted skill of Guido Calza. Under some pressure from

About Trajan’s successor Hadrian ( A.D. 117–138) archaeology and literature, interlocking, tell us so much that we can write his biography from his buildings, with an occasional assist from written sources. The buildings of his reign are numerous and brilliantly designed. We shall take as examples three from Rome and three from the unique complex of his Villa near Tivoli: the Temple of Venus and Rome, the Pantheon, and his mausoleum; the Teatro Marittimo , the Piazza d’Oro , and the Canopus. All

In this chapter strict chronology must be violated, and steps retraced, to discuss in specific detail something of what archaeology has to tell us about the most practical aspect of the Romans’ genius: their talent for engineering. This is best exemplified in roads, baths, aqueducts, and fortification-walls. We have reached in our historical survey the end of Hadrian’s reign, A.D. 138. By this date the main lines of the great consular roads leading from Rome had all been laid down, and later Emp

In the official Italian archaeological journal Notizie degli Scavi for 1951 were reported recent excavations of a grandiose villa near Piazza Armerina, in central Sicily, which had already received some notoriety in the press, for depicting “Bikini girls” in very brief bathing suits ( Fig. 13.1 ). Of this villa traces had always existed above ground, and as early as 1754 the discovery had been reported there of a “temple” (probably the basilica numbered 30 in the plan, Fig. 13.2 ), with a mosaic

CHAPTER 1:  Prehistoric Italy R. J. C. Atkinson, Field Archaeology (London, 1946) P. Barocelli, “Terremare, Palatino, orientazione dei castra e delle città romane,” Bulletino Communale 70 (1942), 131–144 John Bradford, “The Apulia Expedition: An Interim Report,” Antiquity 24 (1950) 84–95 ——, Ancient Landscapes (London, 1957), 85–110 F. von Duhn and F. Messerschmidt, Italische Gräberkunde , 2 vols. (Heidelberg, 1924–1939) C. F. C. Hawkes, The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe (London, 1940) G. Ka