Field Notes

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Selling Antiquity

New Italian Law Looks to Free Market

The immensity of Italy’s cultural heritage is matched only by the burden of caring for it. The latest strategy: putting the market to use.

In June 2002 the Italian parliament passed a law permitting private citizens to acquire bits and pieces of Italy’s cultural heritage deemed of “no particular artistic value.” Two new corporate entities set up by the economic ministry, Patrimonio dello Stato SpA and Infrastrutture SpA, will manage sales.

The new law also calls for an inventory of Italian cultural holdings, from Bronze Age archaeological sites and military barracks built in the l870s to beaches leased to private citizens. This will be the first official census of Italy’s artistic and historical heritage.

“We won’t sell the Colosseum,” said one heritage ministry official, “but we do need to know what we own and can manage better, or turn over to others to manage.” In a statement that one acerbic critic called “an admission of defeat,” heritage minister Giuliano Urbani said that private concerns may be able to maintain Italy’s cultural heritage “better than the government can.”

In Italy, these are fighting words. In 1894 the young state (formed only in 1870) hired a private contractor, Vincenzo De Prisco, to excavate an ancient wine estate at Boscoreale, which, like Pompeii, was buried in the 79 A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius. De Prisco sold most of his finds—splendidly wrought silver cups, vases and a pitcher—to the Rothschild banking family, which resold it to the Louvre, where it is today.

This loss prompted the adoption of the 1909 heritage law, which was expanded upon by Mussolini three decades later. Still on the law books today, this law stipulates that antiquities found anywhere in Italian territory are the property of the nation as a whole. Among its provisions:

1. The state art heritage belongs to all citizens as heirs of antiquity.

2. The state has the obligation to protect and to manage its heritage and to promote scientific research regarding it.

3. The heritage, inasmuch as it is part of the national identity, is inalienable—that is, it cannot be given away.

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But what is that “heritage”? What can be stripped off without undermining national identity?

The problem of providing an answer begins with the sheer abundance of material. Italy owns roughly half of the physical cultural heritage of Europe. This includes 3,500 museums, 57,000 monuments, hundreds of archives dating back to the Middle Ages, and 2,100 archaeological sites. All but a few museums, archives and sites are publicly owned.

Such money-making tourist destinations as Pompeii or the Colosseum will not be sold off under the new law. But it may affect more obscure sites—and perhaps for the good. Some way must be found, for example, to maintain the eighth-century B.C. villages that dot the coast of Calabria in southern Italy.

The number of sites needing care expands almost daily as new sites are uncovered during the routine construction of roads, pipelines and shopping centers. Moreover, modern standards for maintenance, conservation and custodial care are higher than in the past, and more costly.

To finance all this, Italy devotes .l5 percent to .2 percent of its national budget, less than half of what other West European countries spend. For decades no government has dared to forage in the existing budget to increase the figure, or to seek higher taxes for cultural affairs—which heritage minister Urbani promises to do.

When the bill was passed, scholars, journalists, environmental groups and archaeologists asked, Who is to determine what can be sold, and by what criteria? When I mentioned these protests to a senior heritage ministry official, he responded: “What do you have against private museums? Don’t you have them in the U.S.?”

Still, as another heritage ministry official conceded, “It is a slippery slope.”

The bill made even Italy’s 82-year-old President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi nervous. Signing it into law, Ciampi also sent a formal letter to Premier Silvio Berlusconi asking for the exclusion of “all principal public heritage sites.” His letter underscored the vagueness of the law.

Critics have argued that Italy has no heritage of “no particular artistic value.” Antonio Paolucci, superintendent of cultural heritage in Tuscany, warned against destroying what he called “the scattered museum: the small and unknown minimal adornments that grace every street of a town, however degraded, and every corner of the territory, even the most ill-used.”

On August 6, 2002, the government issued an 800-page document that was the first installment of the census listing state properties. The list included an entire ancient Roman walled city covering several acres, Alba Fucens,^a in the Abruzzi mountains east of Rome.

The list also included a palace on the isle of Capri where the emperor Tiberius governed during his last years. This once incredibly luxurious palace, known today as the Villa Jovis, stands on a high cliff commanding an unforgettable view (above).

Will these sites be sold to developers? Absolutely not, heritage ministry officials say.

Who knows what will come of the new law? Critics fear the loss of great swathes of undocumented history. Advocates claim that the privatization of museums and archaeological services (such as selling admission tickets at Pompeii) is helping to improve some sites. Sorely needed revenues may also be obtained by offering duplicate objects for sale—thus also freeing up space in Italy’s cluttered museums.

One thing is certain: Given the rampant looting of Etruscan tombs and other archaeological sites, as well as the huge number of illegal objects of cultural heritage (Italian police recovered almost 100,000 illegal objects between 1996 and 2000), something must be done.

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Olympics Watch 2004

Whenever a Spade Touches the Ground …

Recent building in and around Athens in anticipation of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games has created an unlikely marriage between construction crews and preservationists. Whenever an ancient artifact or structure is uncovered, construction is halted and archaeologists are called in to excavate the site. The financial burden caused by these delays—sometimes months long—has been shouldered by the builders.

The most recent stoppage occurred 18 miles northeast of Athens, where the Olympic rowing center is to be built. Last September, archaeologists discovered the ruins of three 4,000-year-old houses near the start of the planned rowing course. The Central Archaeological Council decided that the ruins of two of the three homes had to be relocated to make way for the Olympic venue.

After the foundations were excavated (above), engineers dug beneath them by hand, making small holes into which cement was poured. Once the cement grid had hardened, the houses were hoisted up by a crane and moved 33 to 50 feet away, where they will be incorporated into a display for visitors.

Last year, in building an equestrian center 10 miles southeast of Athens, archaeologists uncovered the remains of a 2,500-year-old temple dedicated to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. More than 20 rescue excavations were conducted in the vicinity of the planned equestrian center before construction was allowed to resume.

The construction of Athens’s subway system, begun in 1992, has uncovered more than 30,000 artifacts, including amphoras (above), statues, vases, coins, oil lamps and terracotta drain pipes.

A magnificent first-century A.D. marble statue of a male nude was uncovered during the building of the central Syntagma station, which has been turned into a kind of mini-museum. Riders are greeted by well-lit glass display cases containing artifacts found during the construction of the subway.

When the Kerameikos metro station was already near completion, it was determined that the subway line would have to pass through Athens’s best-preserved ancient necropolis. Officials eventually decided to abandon the station and convert it into a parking facility or cultural center.

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Hadrian’s Lament

Memorial to Emperor’s Lover Found in Tivoli

The middle aged emperor Hadrian (117–138A.D.) “cried with the tears of a woman” when he learned that his lover, Antinous, had drowned in the Nile. The youth had accompanied the emperor ona tour of the Roman provinces, and he may have offered himself as a suicide to hasten the Nile floods during a time of drought.

In his grief, Hadrian dedicated festivals to and named cities after his lost Antinous. The emperor even identified a newly discovered star as his deified lover. In addition, he ordered his artisans to make commemorative statues of the youth, including the colossal representation of Antinous as an Egyptian pharaoh, above, discovered at Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli, 20 miles northeast of Rome. Last fall archaeologists discovered traces of a sanctuary to Antinous in Hadrian’s villa: a 270-square foot chamber probably dedicated to the youth and to Osiris, the Egyptian god of the afterlife.

Archaeologist Anna Maria Reggiani, superintendent for Italy’s Lazio region, and her team also found a number of Egyptian antiques at the site, including a granite statue of Pharaoh Ramesses II (1279–1213 B.C.), which Hadrian probably had transported from Memphis.

The temple ruins included a 100-foot-wide semicircle of columns, two rectangular buildings and a nymphaeum (or water park) with niches for statues and fountains. Well-preserved tunnels were discovered beneath the temple complex—perhaps designed to allow maintenance crews to perform their chores out of sight.

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Current Exhibitions

Prehistoric Arts of the Mediterranean

Some of the earliest objects in the Getty Museum’s collection are featured in this exhibit, which includes Neolithic stone figures, a large Cycladic fertility goddess (whose ancient repairs suggest that she was highly treasured) and early Bronze Age bowls.

Egypt Reborn: Art for Eternity

The Brooklyn Museum of Art has expanded its ancient Egyptian holdings with the addition of more than 600 objects from the predynastic period (late fourth millennium B.C.) to the reign of Amenophis III (1390–1352 B.C.). Among the items on display are a flint knife with an elaborately carved ivory handle depicting 227 animals, as well as three carved wooden tomb statues more than 4,000 years old.

The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South India

For this traveling exhibition, the first major survey of Chola-period bronzes, more than 60 sculptures from southern India have been culled from collections in the United States and Europe. The Chola Dynasty (9th–13th centuries A.D.) produced bronze sculptures known for representing heroic themes with a graceful balance. The exhibition focuses on the iconography of the Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu, though it also contains examples of Buddhist bronzes.

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Seti Dies Again!

Replicating a New Kingdom Tomb

In the next few weeks, conservators will begin creating an accurate, life-sized facsimile of the tomb of New Kingdom pharaoh Seti I (1294–1279 B.C.), which has been closed to the public since the late 1980s because of structural problems.

Factum Arte, a conservation company based in Britain and Spain, is working with Egypt’s Ministry of Culture and Supreme Council of Antiquities to create an exact replica of the 400-foot-long tomb, one of the most lavishly adorned in the Valley of the Kings. The company—which recently made a copy of the burial chamber of Thutmose III (1479–1425 B.C.) for the traveling exhibition The Quest for Immortality—has designed new technological tools specifically for the project, including three-dimensional laser scanners and equipment capable of producing extremely high-resolution digital images.

Seti’s tomb was discovered in 1817 by the explorer Giovanni Belzoni, who damaged many of the tomb’s wall reliefs by making squeezes (wax impressions) of them. In order to capture the tomb’s original appearance, workers will replicate artifacts from the tomb that are now on display in various museums.

Progress, however, will be slow. Facsimiles of the mortuary chambers’ walls (below) will require patient finishing by hand. Simply to document the files for the color and 3-D data will take one person three years, says a Factum Arte representative.

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Roman-British Water Wheel

Just Another Feat of Ancient Engineering

Archaeologists and engineers have recreated a Roman water-lifting machine, based on 1,900-year-old remains from two ancient wells discovered in London in September 2001. A full-scale reconstruction of the massive wooden contraption has been erected outside the Museum of London (above), where it will be on display until the end of May.

The 12-foot-high machine, with its complicated assemblage of wheels, cogs and oak buckets linked by iron fittings, is capable of drawing 15,000 gallons of water from a well every 10 hours—enough to satisfy the daily needs of 8,000 people, or one-third of London’s population during the early second century A.D. Those who recreated the machine believe that slaves or animals rotated a shaft that turned a wheel fitted with a chain of buckets. As the wheel turned, the buckets would dip into the well, pick up water, rise to the surface and spill the water into a trough.

The two ancient wells were found near the Roman city of Londinium’s perimeter walls. According to Museum of London senior archaeologist Ian Blair, the archaeologists noticed the well’s timber lining—which dates to the mid-first century A.D.—just a few feet below ground level. Hollowed-out oak boxes (below), used to catch water and raise it to the surface, were also recovered from the well.

The other nearby well was destroyed by fire around 130 A.D., about the time a conflagration known as “Hadrian’s Fire” scorched Londinium. At the bottom of this second well were the remains of heavy-duty wrought iron links. “The London finds are by far the best-preserved and largest assemblage of bucket-chain elements yet to be discovered from the Roman Empire,” Blair said.

Even so, museum curator Jenny Hall concedes that the team’s reconstruction of the water-lifting machine is partly based on guesswork. “No one has ever found a whole structure. We’ve reconstructed it to the best of our ability, but it might be something a Roman wouldn’t recognize.”

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OddiFacts

Whence “Mausoleum”?

In the fourth century B.C., Maussolos, the ruler of Caria (a small Anatolian kingdom that was a dependency of the Persian empire), built his royal tomb in Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum) on the Aegean coast of present-day Turkey. Hence the term “Mausoleum.” The monument’s lavish sculptures and enormous size (it stood nearly 150 feet high and covered an area of more than 13,000 square feet) made it one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—and Maussolos thus became associated in perpetuity with death.

Selling Antiquity
New Italian Law Looks to Free Market

The immensity of Italy’s cultural heritage is matched only by the burden of caring for it. The latest strategy: putting the market to use.