Appointment Thursday 6 December at 6 pm at the Museo Civico Archeologico of Bologna, via dell’Archiginnasio 2, Bologna.
In 1858 H. Schliemann (1822 · 1890) made his first trip to Italy as a tourist and a businessman. It is not yet the famous character that the world will celebrate as the discoverer of Troy. He will return in the following years, traveling throughout the peninsula, from Emilia to Sicily and Sardinia, strong in the glory that the scientific environment gave him and with the immense wealth accumulated thanks to profitable commercial activities in Russia and the United States.
What was the relationship between the German scholar and Italy? What are your contacts with national academic circles, but also with personalities from the world of politics and culture?
The book reconstructs, through the study of the personal letters and diaries kept in the Schliemann Fund of the Gennadius Library of Athens, together with other Italian archival sources presented for the first time, the thirtieth system of relations between the discoverer of Troy and Italy. After the discovery of the “Treasury of Priam”, at a time when a legal dispute with the Ottoman authorities was still open, Schliemann reflected on the possibility of donating a part of the Trojan collection to the young Kingdom of Italy.
It was a tribute to that land that had begun to appreciate studying its language, a country described in its diaries, with intellectual sagacity and curiosity, but also through the lens of a fine anthropologist who interprets the history and social transformations from the pre-unification years to the ‘unification, end to the tragic event of the death of the scholar occurred in Naples on December 26, 1890.
The diaries are a precious source to shed light, in an unexpected and stimulating way, on unusual aspects of the complex personality of Schliemann, a man of energetic and extravagant nature, eccentric and egocentric, but still endowed with vast horizons. The interest in the art world, the first experiences of collectors of antiquities, but also the attention to the female universe and gastronomic culture, are the missing pieces of a slice of private life, from which emerges an individual who appears much more fascinating than the biographical inscription has left us.
Massimo Cultraro is an archaeologist, first researcher at the National Research Council of Catania, teaches Paletnology and Prehistory Egea at the University of Palermo. A student at the Italian Archaeological School in Athens, he was a visiting professor at Brown University, Providence (USA). He directed the project “The Virtual Museum of Iraq”, an international initiative promoted by the CNR and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2006-2011) and is involved in research activities in Greece and the Caucasus, author of over a hundred articles in scientific journals, published Antiche Civiltà: Grecia, with M. Denti (Milan 1998), L’Anello di Minosse (Milan, 2001) and I Micenei (Rome 2006).
In collaboration with the Archiginnasio Library, custodian of precious Schliemann manuscripts. On the occasion of the presentation of the volume, exhibits from Troy donated by Schliemann to the Museo Civico Archeologico of Bologna will be exhibited in the room.
Free admission while seats are available.
