From Sunday, October 20, Sapienza museums will be open on the weekends to allow visitors to enjoy some of their masterpieces. Moreover, at 11:00 am, there will be the inauguration of a new gallery at the Museum of Classical Arts (Humanities Building) that will exhibit very precious casts of epigraphs for the first time. 

The gallery will showcase a unique collection of about sixty casts, some of which are over a century old. 

“Many of our colleagues come to Sapienza to study our epigraphs because the originals have deteriorated and are hard to read or, in some cases, cannot be accessed,” explains Marcello Barbanera, President of the Sapienza Museum Network. “This is the case, for example, with the inscriptions of Cyrene. Epigraphists now come to Rome, as they did before the Libyan war, too, because some of the inscriptions had become illegible on site, while the casts conserve the full texts.”

The collection is mostly composed of Greek inscriptions collected at the end of the 19^th century and the first thirty years of the 20^th century in areas where Italian scholars were active: Crete, Cyrene and various Italian archaeological sites. The casts were carefully created to visually reproduce the types of materials used by stonecutters, the typographers of antiquity.

Perusing the gallery, the stelae recount stories from the past. There is the stele found in Cyrene (Lybia), the so-called “Testament of Ptolemy” (155 BC), an ante literam life insurance in which the Pharaoh - to overcome his brothers and ensure his own safety from assassination - declared he would leave his lands to the Romans if he died without heirs. And there is the famous Gortyn Code, found in 1844, which brought international fame to Federico Halbherr and earned him the first Chair of Epigraphy in Rome in 1887.

In order to retrieve the inscription, Halbherr had to conduct a dig on a windmill canal wall where the archaic letters were inscribed, obtain permission to purchase the lands and save the monument from damage by the owners who were hostile to him, as well as by the Turkish authorities who censured the translation of the long text. The Gortyn Code revealed regulations for family law at the beginning of the 5^th century BC in Crete on succession, divorce, marriage and heredity. Moreover, it revealed that the social role and juridical ability of women was far greater than the marginal role women played in Athens.

From a material point of view, the most ancient casts exhibited in the Museum are those from Cumae in the 6^th BC. In terms of content, the copy of the stele of the “Founder’s Oath” confirms Herodotus’ story on the foundation of Cyrene at the beginning of the 6^th BC by a group of individuals from Santorini, Ancient Thera, who followed the advice of the Oracle of Delphi.

“For a student used to Ancient Greek through books and dictionaries, being able to physically touch an epigraph is revolutionary and opens up an entirely new perspective. It’s a look into the personal stories of men who speak to us directly from antiquity, a world in which only the few who could read would recite stories out loud and promote the rules of co-existence,” points out Rector Eugenio Gaudio. “This opportunity, together with the rest of the museum collection and the Sapienza tradition for Classics will contribute to reinforcing our position as a centre of excellence for the study of antiquity.” 

Participants at the ceremony include Rector Eugenio Gaudio; Marcello Barbanera,  President of the Sapienza Museum Network; Giorgio Piras, Department of Antiquities Director; Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, Cultural Heritage Director for Rome; Edith Gabrielli, Director of the Lazio Museum Network; Daniela Porro, Director of the National Roman Museum and of the Special Rome Cultural Heritage Supervisory Council and Simonetta Ranalli, Director General, Sapienza University. 

The weekend opening of Sapienza museums will involve the following museums on a rotary schedule: Classical Arts, Medicine, Laboratory of Contemporary Art, Near East, Earth Science and Chemistry.