were particularly prominent during the early years.

The Pontifical Roman Academy of Archaeology was refounded in 1810 and began the first of its numerous series of publications in 1821. Foreigners began to become more prominent in Italian archaeology, with the first formal foreign group established in 1823 by four scholars from northern Europe. The Roman Hyperboreans (Hyperboreisch-römische Gesellschaft) counted among their number the German Eduard Gerhard, who produced many reports of excavations and monuments in Rome and Etruria and is probably best remembered for his magisterial catalog of Etruscan engraved mirrors, Etruskische Spiegel (1840–1867). Gerhard oversaw the 1829 transformation of the Hyperboreans into the larger Istituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, whose role was principally to publish new archaeological finds. One of Gerhard’s first reports was an account of the excavations near the Etruscan city of Vulci (known at the time as Canino). Napoleon Bonaparte’s estranged brother, Lucien, had been made prince of Canino by Pope Pius VII, and the chance discovery of an enormous necropolis in 1828 led to a large-scale program of excavation that saw many painted vases depart for the great museums of Europe (particularly in Germany). Pottery without figured decoration was ordered to be crushed underfoot as poca roba (small stuff), to prevent it from disrupting the market. Excavations were conducted throughout Etruria, with sensational results. The great early Etruscan “princely” tomb from Cerveteri, known as the Tomba Regolini-Galassi, was discovered in 1836; most of the finds are now in the Villa Giulia, a papal villa built in the mid-sixteenth century and converted into a museum for antiquities from the “Regione of Lazio” in 1889. The Frenchman Alessandro François’s discovery of the François Tomb at Vulci crowned a career of excavation lasting over thirty years, and his description of the bodies and fabrics crumbling on contact with the outside air probably inspired the famous scene in Federico Fellini’s film Roma, in which engineers digging a tunnel for the Metro suffer a similar phenomenon in the Roman chamber they discover. The important paintings in the François Tomb, apparently representing historical conflicts between Romans and Etruscans, were immediately recorded by the artist Carlo Ruspi, who had accurately reproduced a number of the painted decorations from Etruscan tombs being excavated in the necropolis of Tarquinia. These records preserve decorations that have mostly disappeared in since 1850. The British concentrated more on topography and the recording of extant monuments in Etruria than on excavation; several studies appeared in the 1830s and 1840s, before the publication of George Dennis’s magnificent Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848).

Slightly to the north, interest in the prehistory of Italy was sparked by Gozzadini’s discovery of an Iron Age necropolis near his native Bologna in 1853. The people in the necropolis were cremated in biconical ash-urns in the European style; they were predecessors of the Etruscans, and their culture is known today as Villanovan, after the estate belonging to Gozzadini on which the necropolis was discovered. The principles associated with sir charles lyell’s new geology were being brought into Italy by naturalists and geologists and had an immediate effect on the study of prehistory, often known in Italy as paletnologia. The ideas of Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Darwin, and others were fairly rapidly diffused in Italy, and the effect of the developing discipline of prehistory in switzerland on the many Italian political exiles who fled there was also significant. These factors were influential in the debates about the Bronze Age remains being excavated in the Po Valley, where the sodden soil allowed the preservation of wooden structures. The Bronze Age dwellings of the so-called Terramara culture could be compared with Swiss lake-dwellings and Scandinavian structures; links with northern Europe led to a widespread view that the people who built them were transalpine Indo-European migrants. For a time the Po Valley was regarded as the cradle of Italian civilization, since elements of the Terramara culture were argued to have moved south over time.

Fundamental for the development of Italian archaeology was the unification of Italy, begun in 1859. Giuseppe Garibaldi completed the