This summer season, the Italian archaeologist Tiziana D’Angelo had loads on her plate. Because the director of the Parchi archeologici di Paestum e Velia, the twin archaeological websites that lie south of Italy’s Amalfi Coast, D’Angelo had begun overseeing the long-planned excavation of a just lately found historical Greek sanctuary. On the identical time she was additionally devising the reinstallation of the Paestum website’s elegant Twentieth-century museum constructing, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Paestum.
However life then grew to become much more hectic. On 1 August, Massimo Osanna, the director basic of museums at Italy’s ministry of tradition, introduced that D’Angelo would tackle extra duties because the deputy director of the Royal Palace of Naples, a thousand-room construction relationship to the early seventeenth century that has suffered managerial and budgetary setbacks lately. Now overseeing two of southern Italy’s main cultural establishments, every with a workers of round 100, she has two very full plates to cope with.
“It’s a whole lot of work, however I’ve at all times been a little bit of a workaholic,” says D’Angelo, a 42-year-old native of Milan. She plans to divide her week between Naples and her Paestum workplace.
Relationship again to the founding of the Greek colony of Poseidonia round 600BC, the Paestum website is understood for its three well-preserved Doric temples. Not like the excavated ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, additional north alongside the coast in direction of Naples, the temple trio survived the previous 2,500 years above floor, in plain view.
New-found sanctuary
This summer season, a group of resident archaeologists resumed their work on Paestum’s sanctuary space, close to the previous metropolis partitions, which had disappeared from view for hundreds of years. The sanctuary was found in 2019 on personal farmland inside the boundaries of the archaeological park, however work was interrupted by the Covid epidemic. After an preliminary preparatory part from 2022 to 2024, work was once more placed on maintain whereas the Paestum and Velia parks negotiated the formal acquisition of the farm. This autumn, D’Angelo and her group are embarking on the end result of the dig, which she anticipates will take one other 12 months.
Each Paestum and the Royal Palace are actually umbrella organisations. Paestum is paired with Velia, one other website with historical Greek origins some 50 kilometres away. In the meantime the Royal Palace, recognized for its wealthy ornamental arts holdings, immediately oversees the Villa Pignatelli, a Neo-Classical villa as soon as belonging to the Rothschilds, and in addition administers the outer premises of Teatro San Carlo (the Naples opera home) and the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III, one in every of Italy’s largest libraries, each of that are housed within the palace.
Tiziana D’Angelo: “It’s a whole lot of work, however I’ve at all times been a little bit of a workaholic”
Picture: © Sandro Michahelles
D’Angelo says that Osanna nominally holds the title of director in Naples however she is chargeable for managerial duties. She’s going to run the 2 organisations concurrently till a brand new everlasting director will be discovered for the Royal Palace, probably in early 2026. The four-year contract of Mario Epifani, the previous Royal Palace director who arrived in 2020, was not renewed.
Paestum’s three celebrated Greek temples had been predominant points of interest on the 18th-century Grand Tour—etched by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, examined by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and described by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Constructed by Greek colonists, then inherited by Italic tribes and eventually taken over by the Romans, the town was all however deserted, as malaria compelled a later medieval settlement to greater, drier floor. The temples, usually thought of the best surviving examples of their kind in the entire of the Mediterranean, weren’t found as a lot as rediscovered. The just lately found sanctuary, to the west of the traditional city, had a distinct destiny.
The three predominant temples “had been by no means actually excavated”, D’Angelo says, however “had been at all times uncovered”. On the newly unearthed sanctuary, archaeologists now “have the chance to doc” the entire of its buried historical past.
Damaged open
As a result of the pavement of the sanctuary website’s temple was broken by farming, she explains, “we are able to look inside”, which is one thing “we couldn’t have executed if it had been preserved”. Already, archaeologists have situated capitals from different columns that had been used within the temple’s foundations, testifying to the Greeks’ personal reuse of constructing supplies, in addition to offering proof for a fair earlier temple. D’Angelo says the sooner temple seemingly dates to 570BC or 580BC; it was rebuilt a century later and used for hundreds of years. Up to now, greater than 300 crates of votive objects have been discovered, she says, together with an array of objects “as soon as rigorously organized” close to the temple altar.
The location will permit D’Angelo’s group to “reconstruct the transformation” of Poseidonia/Paestum, from its Greek founding to its Roman reinvention. This new chapter within the historical past of Magna Graecia, as southern Italy’s Greek settlements are collectively recognized, would be the topic of an exhibition on the Paestum museum in early 2026.
Southern Italy’s archaeology websites have a method of propelling their administrators upward. Osanna is himself an archaeologist who beforehand ran the park at Pompeii. And D’Angelo’s predecessor in Paestum, German-born archaeologist Gabriel Zuchtriegel, is now the director at Pompeii, which, because the pandemic, has seen attendance figures soar to new, near-unmanageable heights.
The previous few years have turned out to be fairly a trip for D’Angelo herself. Again in 2022, when she was first appointed Paestum director, she was an assistant professor on the UK’s College of Nottingham, albeit one with a Harvard doctorate and stints at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Artwork and California’s Getty Analysis Institute. She says she “would love someday” to work on the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, the very prime of the heap of Europe’s classical antiquities collections.
