The “Rediscovering Agatha” was a success! It was organised at St Agatha’s Museum, with the cooperation of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura. During the conference, we offered an overview of the rediscoveries that took place in St Agatha’s catacombs during the last centuries and then the rebranding of the catacombs and museum was presented. After a light refreshment, attenders had the possibility to visit the crypt with a special guided tour.
Here are some pictures and the full presentation
Next weekend we will celebrate European Researchers’ Night and the project UndergroundMed will be presented in two different events.
On the 26th of September, let’s join together at st Agatha’s Catacombs in Rabat for Rediscovering Agatha!
The catacombs of St Agatha in Rabat have been a topic of interest since the 17th century. The tunnels, crypt, and paintings from different periods have always attracted the attention of scholars, travellers, curious individuals, and devotees.
Rediscovering Agatha, organised as part of the European Researchers’ Night 2025, will retrace the stages of the rediscovery of the catacombs of St Agatha and the role of foreign archaeologists in the investigation process. The research currently underway and the future of the site will also be presented.
On the 27th of September, instead, I will showcase the project at the EU Corner in the big fair Science in the City in Valletta!
Anyone interested in the state of the Christian catacombs in Malta at the beginning of the 17th century should read Marco Antonio Axiaq’s ‘Relazione della nuova e grandissima divotione’ (Report on the new and great devotion). Axiaq was a Maltese surgeon who wrote a long description of the island in 1610, divided into several parts, of which only three handwritten copies of different chronologies remain today, addressed to various notable figures.
Axiaq provides the first descriptive mention of the Maltese catacombs, saying that they were somewhat frequented by locals in the early 17th century, although they remained completely misunderstood. He saw them first-hand and interpreted them above all as historical proof of the “victory” of the Christian religion over paganism.
Axiaq was the first to provide the names of five Christian hypogea on the island (St Paul, Madonna della Virtù, Madonna della Grotta, St Agatha, St Venera), but he also hinted at the presence of many other sites scattered throughout Malta.
Given the importance of the text and the difficulty in finding it, we transcribe below the part on the catacombs as contained in the manuscript version of the National Library of Malta (NLM, Lib. 515).
Relazione della nuova e grandissima divotione introdotta nella Santa Grotta di San Paolo nell’isola di Malta con una breve raccolta delle cose notande et antichità di detta Isola scritta per Marco Antonio Haxach Maltese
NLM 515, ff. 5v-6
Sono in questa Isola oltre l’antiche Reliquie delli grandissimi edifici, grotte sotterranee tagliate con mirabile destrezza, e forma, ed alcune cellule, et altri usci e portine, che d’una grotte s’entrava poi nell’altra con diversi appartamenti e se ne ritrovano alcuni de loro che a questa guisa se scondono da mezzo miglio, e più, considerandole alcune persone curiose stimarono, che anticamente gli abitanti di quest’Isola in quelle habitassero, perché forse li terremoti erano spessi, e grandi, o perché il modo di fabricare case ancor trovato non fosse, non havendo considerato questi tali di quello che nelle grotte si scorge, il che io con dura fatiga molte volte ad alcuni di loro ho disingannato con mostrargli manifestamente esser sepolture, e non ad altro fine fatte, ancorché così belle, e con diversi lavori abbellite fossero poiché si vede, che nella maggior parte di loro nella medesima pietra vi è il cavo, quanto può stare il corpo umano, e d’altri cavi piccoli per li figliuoli, nelle quali per insino al dì di hoggi ossa e teste umane si ritrovano, ed alcune ancora con balate di pietra coperte, e dentro alcuni vasetti, piattini, lucerne d’ogni, fatti di creta, di diverse forme all’uso antico per il che io ho sempre giudicato, che gli habitanti antichi, come Gentili l’opinione di Pitagora avessero avuto della trasmigrazione dell’Anime, cioè che uscendo da un corpo qual’all’ora moriva, inanzi che un altro s’introducesse visitando quelli corpi, nelli quali prima era stata cossì errante andava trovandoli cossì bene acconcie, e di quelle antiche ceremonie, che far si solevano, si compiaceva, tenevano che questa era la sua gloria, se bene poi questa, e tutte le altre vane et erronee opinioni di Gentili, non solo de’ Maltesi ma da tutti i fedeli furono abolite et annichilate mediante il lume della S. Fede Cattolica dal Nostro Redentor Gesù Christo imparata, e dai suoi SS. Apostoli e Ministri della S. Chiesa predicata, colla quale come suoi figli, e seguaci Cattolici ci confirmiamo.
11r
Ad imitazione di questa S. Grotta già Chiesa consecrata dal Glorioso S. Paolo successivamente li Christiani altre grotte coltivorno, che più comode gli parevano tanto in nome della SS. Madonna, come ce n’è intorno a questa Città Notabile alcune insin al dì d’oggi, com’è la Madonna della Virtù, la Madonna della Grotta incorporata poi dalli Padri di S. Domenico dove già fabricato lor Convento, così anche d’alcuni altri Santi, che di mano in mano dalla S. Romana Chiesa sono stati Canonizati, come S. Agata, S. Vennera e molti altri sparsi per questa Isola.
The project UndergroundMed was presented among the on-going research project at the University of Malta Research Expo 2025 held in Valletta on 28 May 2025.
Abstract and presentation
Notes from Underground: the project UndergroundMed
The MSCA project UndergroundMed traces the history of the rediscovery of ancient catacombs between the 16th and 20th centuries across the Mediterranean, in particular Italy, Malta, and Tunisia. It analyses the topic from a broad European perspective, through studies conducted on travel routes, explorations, archive and museum collections, and it enhances the role of European scholars in creating an international and multicultural research-network while travelling across the shores of the Mediterranean in search for catacombs. I will share some preliminary results of this systematic analysis on catacombs rediscovery, to illustrate how UndergroundMed defines the role played by catacomb archaeology in building a European common culture.
[This is part of the text read during a public lecture at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Rome on 30 April 2025]
From the mid-sixteenth century, the discovery of many Christian catacombs in Rome spread knowledge about early Christian art throughout Europe, and made catacombs a popular subject. This process took place through promotion of academic studies, vast numbers of copies, and museum displays, all supporting the progress of archaeological discoveries. This phenomenon from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries is obviously connected to political key events occurring in the Papal States.
One can say that the history of Christian archaeology cannot be divorced from the political and confessional use of the the catacombs. This use constantly characterised the work of many researchers and scholars, in periods when Christian archaeology was perceived as an official, national, catholic and papal discipline. They mostly fostered this relation between catacomb archaeology and politics through their scholarly publications and the production of copies of catacomb paintings. What is certainly evident is the key role of the papacy, which from time to time finds a political and cultural reason to reassert its authority through its most ancient past and claiming authority and exclusive control on it over the centuries, and playing a pivotal role in the process of dissemination of Christian art.
Catacombs for the Counter-Reformation agenda
Knowledge of the catacombs and the artistic treasures they contained was never totally ignored or forgotten contrary to long-standing assertions made by questionable but influential twentieth-century historiography. Records of pilgrims visiting the catacombs as part of the Christian-Rome cult circuit are numerous from the Middle Ages to the early modern age. Renaissance humanist scholars were the first to analyse the art of catacombs, often based on first-hand knowledge acquired during visits to the sites themselves. The scholarly impact of the construction of New St. Peter’s throughout the whole sixteenth century, an intervention that required extensive and lengthy excavations, was very important too: on that occasion, a significant number of sarcophagi, epigraphs and artefacts came to light, representing the first major contact for the modern world of Rome with early Christian art.
A crucial event happed on 31 May, 1578, during the pontificate of Gregory XIII: the accidental discovery of a Christian catacomb within the Sanchez vineyard on the Via Salaria Nova (at that time identified as the catacomb of Priscilla, but later in the late twentieth century as the Anonymous Catacomb of Via Anapo), with its impressive set of wall paintings. This is considered to be the moment when Christian archaeology began. However questionable that narrative is, this discovery nonetheless represented a real novelty involving sections of Roman population of the countryside, hitherto excluded from the rediscovery of and appreciation for Christian antiquities. These underground tunnels, marvellously decorated with paintings, totally unknown and extraordinary, attracted an incredible number of people, so much so that Gregory XIII decided to fence off the area (and then that the fence was torn down by eager groups of visitors), including not only clerics, scholars, and antiquarians, but also, and perhaps above all, ordinary people. This novel attention to of ancient Christian art is extremely interesting for the political and confessional use of catacomb art, because it appeared to have a great appeal for common people everywhere and could be used to convey Catholic messages in Italy and beyond. The first discovery of a catacomb also stimulated the search for more underground cemeteries throughout the Roman countryside, archaeological forays led by scholars, ordinary citizens, and different religious groups.
That feverish research culminated in 1634 with the publication of the first monograph on the Roman catacombs, Antonio Bosio’s Roma Sotterranea. This work and the explorations of catacombs led by Bosio increased indeed the international interest in the catacombs. While Christian cemeteries had already attracted the attention of scholars during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after 1578, scholars or artists from all over Europe and Italy flocked to Rome with the intention of drawing and describing the paintings found in the catacomb galleries.
In a cultural context generally dominated by the new Tridentine needs in developing a new, unique artistic discourse controlled and directed by the Catholic Church, we must recall clear links between a genuine interest in Christian antiquities and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, with sacred antiquaria and apologetics in support of Catholic historiography. In fact, Roman and other European Catholic scholars of the second half of the sixteenth century were very keen to render service to the Catholic Church. Certainly, the findings, and in particular the paintings of the catacombs, could corroborate knowledge derived from literary and historical sources, and both could be used to legitimize a Catholic position against Protestant divisions. The most immediate interest was to record the paintings that were being gradually discovered during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in various Roman cemeteries. This was due to the intrinsic wonder aroused by the sight of such unknown, mysterious and yet so well-preserved Christian paintings, and to their clear link to scriptural episodes narrated in the early times of the new religion, but well known to contemporary Catholics and Protestants. These ancient paintings conveyed familiar religious stories and concepts, moreover in an easily understood visual language.
It was precisely the memory of a heroic era of the Church, of which the stories of saints and martyrs represented the main legacy, that produced a particular interest in the catacombs. In fact, a revival of early Christian themes and symbols, like palm as a sign of martyrdom, were used in all the arts to translate into images the Tridentine needs to create a set of iconographies to develop new resources for the faithful and new devotions to foster popular piety. This revival was translated into new styles, and tastes, as proven, for example, by the widespread diffusion of paintings with early Christian saints (Caecilia above all) in churches and private houses in the early seventeenth-century. Even the grandly Baroque architecture sought to make ancient Christianity present through the monumental recreation of early Christian liturgical spaces, which was one of the main aims of the great reconstructions of Roman churches financed by the various popes.
From a political point of view, the discovery, study, and recreation of early Christian art found in the catacombs therefore had a broad cultural role, expressed into two main directions. First, early Christian pictorial art was presented as incorrupt, pure, severe, and spiritual, thus the perfect vehicle for a process of artistic and figurative renewal of Catholicism that was to serve to counter Protestant criticism . Second, it is precisely the discovery of early Christian art and its clear message that served to convey and promote unbroken continuity of the Roman Church from apostolic times to the present. The catacomb images were very old; but in a certain sense, they were new too because they were reinterpreted as living images, models to be imitated, and a source of artistic inspiration.
Christian archaeology din late nineteenth century
One has to wait until the 1850s for the next great change in the history of Christian archaeology to take place. Under the pontificate of Pius IX (1846-1878), in particular, the promotion of the excavation and study of Roman catacombs became extensive and more explicitly political. The Roman Republic (1849), the exile in Gaeta in the Bourbonic Kingdom and the return to Rome were the initial act of a pontificate characterised by perennial conflicts with the emerging kingdom of Italy that culminated in the end of the Papal States and thus of the popes’ political power in 1870. Given such political turmoil, unique in the history of the papacy, Pius IX was called upon to promote the papacy’s temporal power and Catholic Christianity with self-assertive policies at both the local and international level. Until the end of his pontificate, Pius IX insisted on the self-exaltation of Christian culture and the centrality of Rome in an international culture with ancient apostolic roots. Christian antiquity therefore assumed a key role in the cultural policy of Pius IX, who financed important initiatives for the development of the discipline of Christian archaeology. The Roman catacombs were proposed as a symbol of the times of persecution and thus a material embodiment of the martyrial narrative with which his pontificate was cloaked.
Events that supported this objective occurred in the first years of Pius IX’s pontificate. In 1860 Europe was in the midst of numerous social transformations, revolutionary uprisings and wars of independence due to nationalistic drives hostile to the great empires reformed after the Congress of Vienna. These upheavals resulted in the emergence of nation states, particularly in Italy, where the papacy lost its territory. In a slow political and cultural process culminating in the capture of Rome in 1871, Pope Pius IX (1846-1878) saw his temporal dominion reduced to the Vatican City. We were thus facing the most radical geopolitical change on the continent, in which the political as well as the cultural definition of nations played a very important role.
Under the cultural point of view, the pope made use of the work of the Jesuit Giuseppe Marchi (1795-1860), who is considered one of the founders of Christian archaeology as a scientific discipline, and Giovanni Battista de Rossi, who was then his young assistant. The two were put in charge of excavations in countless catacombs and were also entrusted with the dissemination their discoveries in textual and visual reports/accounts. They were also the protagonists of Pius IX’s major institutional foundations dedicated to Christian archaeology. The Commission of Sacred Archaeology (1852) oversaw the study and protection of the catacombs and other Christian monuments while the Lateran Christian Museum (1854) included a lapidary section to provide a proper place to display the many works of art found in the catacombs. It functioned, in effect, as an appendix to the visit to the catacombs, replete with didactic intents designed to advance the understanding Christian antiquities . Here, then, we are in front of a real state archaeology, scientifically conducted, but in the overt service of a political agenda. If that were not enough, there were large construction and restoration campaigns that became more customary as the situation became more complicated: think of the large investments for the restoration of the great early Christian basilicas such as S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura, Santa Maria in Trastevere, or even St Paul’s outside the walls after it was destroyed by a huge fire in 1823; as well as the celebration of the papal soldiers defeated in the battles against the Reign of Italy, who in the contemporary narrative rose to the rank of martyrs of the faith and received a monument in St John Lateran, the city’s cathedral.
The National Art Museum of Catalonia overlooks Barcelona from the top of Montjuïc Hill. The neoclassical building, created as architecture for the 1929 World’s Fair, houses a late 19th-century collection joined by recent acquisitions of works from Catalan modernism, Novecentism, communism, and republicanism.
The most impressive part, however, is the important section of Catalan Romanesque painting. It consists of wall paintings of 12th-13th century churches, torn apart and then brought back to the museum recreating apses and naves to recall the original architecture and the measurements of spaces and volumes. The colors of the original paintings stand out against the neutral grayscale background of the reconstructed walls, and give an impressive and overwhelming feeling. The historical issue is central: bishops, chaplains, conservators setting up detachment and reconstruction practices in the museum: they are the ones responsible for this massive centuries-long effort to protect the paintings from abandonment, sales, expatriation and civil war. Rural churches are stripped but museums are born and populated.
And the question of their presence in the museum is central: their connection to their site of origin has been destroyed, but their placement in precise structures that recall their original location serves to stitch up this narrative, to not turn these paintings into paintings with only aesthetic value, to keep them in touch with their liturgical and religious essence.
Seeing these large reconstructed apses is a unique thrill: Catalan Romanesque in a museum is too important an experience for museology to go unnoticed.
Even the didactic and explanatory apparatus is impressive. First of all, the process is explained, which is what is surely of most interest, and which is explained in a rotating three-language video, with the procedure divided into four sections for each of the three phases-tear, restoration, new support-showing original images of a 1978 intervention. In the tour there is the possibility to see the back of the structures of the apses, thus understanding the chronological and technical difference between the various specimens. The windows are closed with evidently removable slabs. To show the ancient graffiti on the paintings, a lighting system is set up to highlight and magnify them in rotation. An educational workshop with music and puppets is provided for children, and there are indeed many children drawing in front of the apses. Also notable are the educational aids for the blind: panels of the right height, reconstructions in three dimensions, braille, plaques with surveyed contours, beautiful indications of scale and techniques (e.g., the reconstructed enamel plaque).
Absolute contemplative pleasure of polychrome wooden sculpture, not as lively, varied and numerous as at Vic’s Episcopal Museum but of the highest level. Some 12th-century crucifixes in pure art nouveau style, marvelous on their white backgrounds, the light directed on them and, behind, the stark and despairing shadow of the crucifixion. There are also many altar fronts, displayed on the wall as paintings or reconstructed with their own cross and canopy.
Finally my latest book is here:
An Archaeologist in Rome at the Service of the Order: Letters from the Hospitaller Grand Master to Antonio Bosio (1604–1629), Routledge: New York and London, 2025.
I wrote my doctoral thesis, about ten years ago now, on Antonio Bosio, a seventeenth-century archaeologist and scholar who, the illegitimate son of a knight, was brought as a child from Malta to Rome and spent his entire life discovering and exploring the catacombs of Rome. The studies on Bosio, and all those that came in connection, have been the important basis on which I built my researcher portfolio and led me to my current job, which I truly love.
At the time when I finally published -in June 2020- the volume based on my doctoral thesis (Antonio Bosio e i primi collezionisti di antichità Cristiane, Piac: Vatican City, 2020), I did not really think it would end there. In fact, when in February 2022 I signed the contract with Routledge for the publication of the Grand Master’s letters to Antonio Bosio, it seemed to me that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing: picking up the theme again but focusing on Antonio’s political life, on his work for the Order of Malta and, at the same time, working on unpublished materials preserved in my place of the heart: the National Library of Malta.
Brief description of the book
This volume is part of “The Military Orders Project” series and provides the original texts of the Grand Masters’ letters to Antonio Bosio in Rome, preserved in the National Library of Malta, together with a biographical study on Antonio Bosio, carried out over the years and now expanded with new information and research.
The volume opens with a historical presentation of the Bosio family within the Order of Malta. This is followed by a complete biographical profile of Antonio Bosio, compiled from the Order’s official sources and from archive documents found in various locations.
A short chapter is then dedicated to the presentation of the various archive collections in which Antonio Bosio’s private documents and autograph manuscripts are found, to offer a complete panorama of Bosio’s figure, although I focussed more on the biographical aspects inherent to the Order and his work at its service.
The core of the volume is obviously the letters of the Grand Masters to Bosio from 1604 to the time of his premature death in September 1629. The letters are presented in a simple transcription of their original form, and then their translation into English.
I believe that the task of this book is to offer a set of sources that will be useful to scholars on the international scene for years to come. The aim is to make public as widely as possible material that is not widely accessible, both in geographical (because it is preserved in Malta and so far not public in digital form) and linguistic terms (with these being handwritten in seventeenth-century Italian).
A general, critical reflection on the letters and the role of the Order’s Agent in the early seventeenth century is then proposed in the final two chapters. Here, the texts and their recurring questions are taken as a starting point for further comments, but above all to present the role and prerogatives of the Agent of the Sacred Religion on the basis of what is revealed in the Bosio epistolary.
Summary of the speech read at the XXXI Aiscom Colloquium
The mosaic heritage in catacombs is very limited and concerns ‘three species of mosaic works’: the floors, the slabs (marble or fictile) closing the tombs decorated with series of tesserae, and finally the wall mosaics decorating the arcosolii or the walls and vaults of the cubiculi. I will not refer to catacomb mosaics in general, but focus on a few cases and their collecting fate.
The history of mosaics in museums for the first centuries of the Modern Age has some shadows. For the 16th century, for example, we have little information on pieces of Roman floor mosaics in collections, but I would like to point out that in Chapter VI of Giorgio Vasari’s Vite, Del modo di fare i pavimenti di commesso, in the chapter on architecture (and not on painting…) he comments on the way Roman mosaics were executed ‘come se ne vede in Parione in Roma, in casa di messer Egidio e Fabio Sasso’. Moving on to the 17th century, in the collection of Cardinal Maximus, there was a ‘Stanza ultima de Musaici’, there was a special room adjoining the library, dedicated precisely to the mosaics in the collection. Even in the library itself, however, there were mosaics.
During the 17th century, coinciding with the extensive underground discoveries, the existence of mosaics in the catacombs was noted, and they too entered collections and the antiquities market.
Following a ‘translation of saints’ bones’ in 1656 the mosaic portraits of Flavio Giulio Giuliano and Simplicia Rustica were discovered in the cemetery of Ciriaca, detached between 1656 and 1677 from a tomb with their epigraph and acquired by the collection of Agostino Chigi. They were placed, as was the custom at the time, on the wall in the staircase leading to the Library, according to a design by Pietro da Cortona Chigi and in a pattern not unlike the one we have mentioned for the Massimo collection. An interesting contiguity, therefore, between mosaics and libraries. It was not until 1918 that the mosaics were detached and acquired by the Lateran Christian Museum, where they were again restored.
In the 18th century, the century in which mosaics made their entry into museums and collections, we find several testimonies of mosaics in the catacombs, without precise topographical references, by the Custodian of the Cemeteries Marc’Antonio Boldetti in 1720. He testifies of mosaic decorations on lithic or fictile supports, and is the main source on the topic for that century.
A couple of examples: Boldetti describes a brickwork from the cemetery of Ciriaca, on which there was a monogram between alpha and omega in mosaic tesserae. It is now lost, but at the time it ended in Gaetano Marini’s private collection. I do not think it is a coincidence that a mosaic artefact of this type, i.e. more epigraphic than artistic, aroused the interest of the leading epigrapher of the time, who was also the Vatican Librarian. Secondly, Boldetti draws a direct connection between some mosaics found in the catacombs and the Carpegna Museum: these are mainly ‘several birds and flowers formed on terracotta boards with non-ordinary artifice, and of minute workmanship’, i.e. emblemata, found between the Appia and Ardeatina roads, in particular at Callisto, used as closures for burial niches. All these pieces were later transported to the then Carpegna Museum in the Rione Sant’Eustachio in Rome, of which no further information is available afterwards.
In general, mosaics in collections in the 18th century had to be tear out and cut up to make more artefacts, for immediate placement in an antiquarian market. The 19th century in Rome marked the beginning of massive systematic excavations in the catacombs, the founding of the first institution for the protection of these monuments and above all the opening of a large museum dedicated to them in 1854 at the Lateran Palace, where the discovered mosaics were directly brought. In the Lateran Museum, they are displayed into the wall, following a practice that has been going on for centuries, inaugurated in papal museums by the display of the Dove emblema of Villa Adriana. Indeed, in the Lateran Palace hosted the important museum experiment of displaying the mosaic of the athletes of the Baths of Caracalla, discovered in 1824 and then placed in the museum in 1836, first in an imaginative reconstruction of the floor and then set into the wall, had been developed.
For our theme, an emblematic case is the brick with the mosaic image of a cock, a pavement emblem probably reused to close a niche. It was discovered in 1837 during the works of Virginio Vespignani in the cemetery of Verano, as stated in the sixth volume of Louis Perret’s disputed Catacombes of 1852, which places the mosaic to cover an unspecified martyr’s grave. Upon its discovery, it was sent straight into the Lateran Museum, where it was slightly restored and placed on the wall, in the large gallery of sarcophagi, along with all the other ‘sculptural works’, as noted in the catalogues of the time.
During the 20th century, the museum housed both mosaics previously housed in private collections (as the one in the Chigi Library which passed to the Laternanense Museum and then to the Pio Cristiano in the Vatican) and new discoveries, such as the two fictile slabs decorated with polychrome glass mosaic tiles from the Aproniano catacomb depicting three episodes from the biblical story of Jonah. They were discovered on 1 February 1938, the Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archaeology donated them to the Holy See and they immediately entered the Vatican collections, also becoming part, in 1963, of the new Pius Christian Museum opened in the Vatican after the closure of the Lateran Museum. Perhaps the most linear path in our little story.
One of the most important tasks of an archaeologist on an excavation is to keep a diary in which to record daily work and eventual discoveries, a diary that thus becomes the main source of facts and details of an archaeological exploration of any kind. Keeping an excavation diary is a sort of obligation towards both the past that unfolds before us and the present and future generations that expect us to take care and attention to preserve the discoveries. Even the archaeologists of the past have not shirked this obligation: there are some diaries of excavations from centuries ago that are extraordinary texts (such as, for example, the eighteenth-century diaries of the discoveries of the Vesuvian cities, which take us by the hand on a tour of wonders to places that are still mythical today), but all of them, even the lesser-known ones, maintain a charm that those objects that act as a bridge between us and the thinking of our ancestors know how to have.
One of the most interesting diaries for catacomb archaeology is the excavation diary of the Swiss Paul Styger, archaeologist and scholar of Christian antiquities in Rome, professor of archaeology and religious arts in Poland and one of the protagonists of the potpourri of nations that was the horizon of archaeological science in Rome in the early 20th century.
Due to a series of fortunate circumstances (in particular, his proximity to the German circles in the Vatican that a century ago were carrying out archaeological research and museographic experiments in the Eternal City), Styger found himself -between 1915 and 1917- directing the excavation of the church of San Sebastiano on the Via Appia in Rome. This is a very important site: an ancient church that later became a Baroque jewel, but set on an extensive cemetery area.
Styger’s excavation is particularly concerned with investigating the area directly underneath the nave and the Platonia, with the intention of also tracing the tomb where, according to a tradition invented in the Middle Ages, the bodies of Peter and Paul extracted from their original tombs in the basilicas of the same name would have been temporarily protected.
The diary is a little gem. It starts on 8 February 1915, ends on 27 February 1917 and is a mixture of text and pen illustrations, later coloured in watercolour. It is a true snapshot of what it must have been like to manage an excavation at the time, with constant inspection visits by the Ministry of Education and the Commission of Sacred Archaeology, fluctuating relationships with the workers, and more or less long interruptions for various reasons. The most beautiful feature are of course the drawings, not only of the individual objects found, but also of some of the structural situations found during the excavation.
The diary arrived in its current location in the Vatican Library after Styger’s death in 1939, by his own will, after having been missing for a while. This is confirmed by a letter pasted at the end of the manuscript, in which his sister refers to a certain Gerke who will help her find this diary and donate it to the library. At the end of this letter, an anonymous hand adds, in pen, that he received the diary on 31 May 1939 and adds: ‘And Gerke, if I am not mistaken, is the Nazi whom those of the Commission of Sacred Archaeology allowed to examine the excavations of the catacombs with all freedom, while they would have obstructed the Styger’. A small note full of implications, which relates to the strong relations between archaeological bodies and certain authoritarian political parties in the 1930s and 1940s, an issue that archaeological historiography has yet to come to terms with.
As an appendix to the diary, there are some typed sheets, with pencil-drawn illustrations, in which Styger lists pieces found in various catacombs during the 1920s, which were then lost, either because they were left on the site and treated carelessly, or because they were not handed over to the Vatican Museums. This list, too, is a singular evidence the practices of preserving artefacts: not a few objects were damaged by handlers who had ‘tried to tear them off’, or because they were left ‘without any precautions to save them’.
Please note that the homepage of the UndergroundMed project now hosts the map of the catacombs, archives and museums under study in the project.
The map is being continuously implemented as the research progresses, and will contain a lot of data and information regarding the rediscovery of catacombs in Italy, Tunisia and Malta between the 16th and 20th centuries.
Catacombs rediscovery 