Ceserani Giovanna. Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology

Oxford University Press, 2012. — 348 p.This book tells the story of the modern engagement with the area of South Italy where ancient Greeks established settlements starting in the 8th century BCE-a region known since antiquity as Magna Graecia. This 'Great Greece', at once Greek and Italian, and continuously perceived as a region in decline since its archaic golden age, has long been relegated to the margins of classical studies. The present analysis recovers its significance within the history of classical archaeology. It was in South Italy that the Renaissance first encountered an ancient Greek landscape, and in the 'Hellenic turn' of eighteenth-century Europe the temples of Paestum and the painted vases excavated in South Italy played major roles, but since then, Magna Graecia-lying outside the national boundaries of modern Greece, and sharing in the complicated regional dynamic of the Italian Mezzogiorno in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-has fitted awkwardly into the commonly accepted paradigms of Hellenism. Drawing on antiquarian and archaeological writings, travelogues and modern historiography, and recent rewritings of the history and imagining of South Italy, this study identifies and elaborates the crucial place of Magna Graecia within the creation of modern archaeology. It is an Italian story with European resonance, which offers a unique perspective on the Humanist investment in the ancient past, while it transforms our understanding of the transition from antiquarianism to archaeology; of the relationship between nation-making and institution-building in the study of the ancient past; and of the reconstruction of classical Greece in the modern world.