Another important figure in Rome at the time was Rodolfo Lanciani, who was a professor of Roman topography from 1888 and dominant in that field until his death in 1929. Lanciani surveyed and published information on many monuments and significantly increased our knowledge of the ancient city of Rome at a crucial time, when so much evidence was being discovered and destroyed as the city was redeveloped. His accounts of current excavations in Rome and his history of excavations in the city from the Middle Ages, Storia degli scavi di Roma (History of the Excavations of Rome; 1902), brought him great renown, and many Victorian sitting rooms contained copies of his books, translated into English. Foreign topographers also worked in Rome; the German Karl Hülsen produced important books on the Forum Romanum (1904) and the overall topography of Rome (1907). The American Samuel Platner produced his topography of Rome in 1904; the next year Thomas Ashby became director of the British School and produced a series of topographical works on Rome and the surrounding countryside over the succeeding quarter century. These two scholars collaborated on the Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929), which is still widely used. In the same period the Istituto di Topografia Antica was founded by Giuseppe Lugli, a pupil of Lanciani’s, and topography has remained a separate branch of archaeology to this day, with consequences both positive and negative.

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The Temple of Castor and Pollux,The Forum, Rome

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South Italy and Sicily began to open up to serious archaeological inquiry with the end of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1860. The dominant personality in this regard was Paolo Orsi (1859–1935), one of the most significant figures in the history of Italian archaeology. After the disappointment of losing the chair of archaeology in Rome to Löwy in 1989, the young Orsi concentrated on the exploration of Sicily from his base at Syracuse, where he was inspector of antiquities. He initiated an incredible campaign of excavations at almost all of the type sites for Sicilian pre- and proto-history, turning from art to pursue stratigraphic excavations, typologies, and chronologies based on them, looking both at settlements and at the enormous cemeteries of Sicily. Orsi established the basic phases of Sicilian archaeology, which survive with little alteration to this day, and he did the first significant research on the interaction between Greek colonists and the indigenous populations. He worked mainly in Calabria during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

In southeastern Italy, the early excavations by the Duc de Luynes in the Temple of Apollo at Metaponto in 1828 represented an isolated phenomenon. Little systematic work was done before the beginning of the twentieth century. The growing importance of Taranto (site of the Spartan colony of Taras) as a naval base and industrial port stimulated development there, although a great deal was destroyed in the process. The fundamentally important late–Bronze Age site on the Scoglio del Tonno was completely erased by harbor works, although the superintendent, Q. Quagliati, was able to carry out a rescue excavation for four months. Only since 1990 have