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ROME – The Greek Strabo has its origins in the Osci, a Samnite population of pre-Roman Campania. And for many centuries the famous geographer of the ancients was thought to be right. But the mystery has always remained about the founding of Pompeii, which took place at least 700 years before its tragic end. A haze that the results of the last excavation campaigns began in the archaeological park, a world heritage site, now seem to dissolve with a series of findings that tell another truth: that of an Etruscan city “by language and culture”, although built with He has his own style, which little or nothing recalls that of the country.
Speaking of this, the director of the archaeological park Massimo Osanna – since September also in charge of the general direction of the Mibact museums – who a few days ago, together with the archaeologist Carlo Rescigno, academic of the Lincei professor of classical archeology at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, presented the new discoveries at the Accademia dei Lincei, in a round table with some of the most famous names in the sector, led by Fausto Zevi, academic from Lincei and emeritus professor of the history of Greek and Roman art at the Sapienza in Rome , in Carmine Ampoli, emeritus of Greek history in Normale di Pisa and Pier Giovanni Guzzo, for many years leading the excavations of Pompeii, with the presentation of the academic Roberto Antonelli. In short, the Etruscans would have been, many centuries before the city became a Roman colony, found Pompeii, mold it with the walls, organize its streets “following the sky and the stars” as they had already done for Tarquinia, Veio, Cerveteri, the cities from which its first inhabitants seem to have arrived. Etruscan men would have founded the first sanctuaries, beginning with the one on the outskirts of the city on the road that led from the city to the port of Stabiae, a successful commercial traffic center.
To push “insistently” towards the hypothesis of an Etruscan foundation, Osanna explains, there are mainly objects: hundreds of amphorae, vases and ampoules, among them more than 70 cups with inscriptions found in the excavation of the sanctuary built along the The road that connected the city to the sea, a rectangular open-air construction, resurfaced a few hundred meters from the southern city walls, in what is known as the “Iozzino Fund”, after the name of its former owner. The temple had already been identified in the 60s and excavated again in the 90s – explains the archaeologist – but the most interesting finds and the systematic study of these are a chronicle of our days, with the excavation campaign started in 2014. A discovery , he emphasizes, that makes Pompeii “the place that has returned the greatest number of Etruscan inscriptions outside of Etruria.
Yes, because many of these mugs have graffiti with ritual phrases accompanied by the name of the person who made the offer. And it just so happens that these are always Etruscan names, some of which have never been found before in Campania, but well known in the Etruscan centers of central Italy. Even the honored divinity, in these objects always indicated with the generic “Apa” (“father” in Etruscan), seems to refer to the Etruscan religious culture. A repeating evidence, points out the archaeologist, “for the sanctuary of Apollo, the main Pompeian sacred site, next to the public square” where historical and more recent excavations have returned cups with inscriptions “once again in the alphabet. And language. Etruscan “. The architecture of the urban center, on the other hand, is different, as evidenced by the recent excavations in the sanctuary of Apollo and in the Triangular Forum. Somehow far from both Etruscan and Greek. “Seen more closely, it is a style that is generally absent in the rich panorama of central Campania,” notes Osanna.
Ultimately, the hypothesis is that of a city that was founded and built in a few decades by a group of people, in part perhaps also freed slaves, a community of Etruscan language and culture that, however, to build walls, houses and temples. makes use of “local workers”, influenced by the melting pot of cultures that then animated the Campania region, from Italic to Greek. A community that from its origins is contaminated and enriched by different influences. A rich and powerful city, which dominated the territory and had its satellite center in nearby Stabiae; who had a thousand contacts and businesses and at the same time honored the values and cults of its origins. All this up to a tragic stop. Which arrived in 474 a. And not because of Vesuvius, as it will be five centuries later for the Roman colony, but because of the consequences of a historic naval battle, that of Cuma, which the Greeks, in fact, won against the Etruscans. Pompeii, which in that “international chessboard” was aligned on the side of the homeland, after that battle in fact disappeared, also abandoned by its inhabitants. And a bit like a damnatio memoriae, the darkness that fell on their homes and shrines for decades also carried away the memory of their founders.
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